Don't understand failures over ssh

[reader]

GNU Emacs 22.1.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2007-08-18 on TPAD
Tramp-2.1.11-pre

I'm unable to connect to linux (gentoo) from laptop runnning windowsXP
home.

In the echo area I see `Tramp waiting for prompts from remote shell'
That just hangs there apparently forever.  So hitting Ctrl-g to break
out of it and examine debug buffer.

      ssh reader -l reader -e none && exit || exit Pseudo-terminal
      will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.

Not sure what to do about that.

A second attempt hangs without saying anything about `remote shell' in
echo area.  But times out with this info in *Messages*
   Tramp: Waiting 60s for local shell to come up...
   Tramp: Sending command `ssh reader -l reader  -e none && exit || exit'
   Tramp: Waiting for prompts from remote shell [2 times]
   Quit

   File error: [[Regexp `^///9590159d4c2e16101a35d5ce90147d7e^M?$' not
   found in 10 secs]]

   tramp-wait-for-regexp: [[Regexp
`^///9590159d4c2e16101a35d5ce90147d7e^M?$' not found in 10 secs]] Quit

(The ^M  in regex were actually control char... rewritten here as
plain ascii)

But nothing in the `* *tramp'  buffer

Can someone tell me whats going here?