I am trying to tunnel various IM clients thru ssh to my home server, but it just refuses to accept the forwards. I have added "AllowTCPForwarding yes" to my sshd_config but didn't make any difference.

Here is the debug message:

debug1: fd 12 setting TCP_NODELAY
debug2: fd 12 is O_NONBLOCK
debug2: fd 12 is O_NONBLOCK
debug1: channel 0: new [unknown (remote did not supply name)]
debug3: channel 0: waiting for connection
debug1: channel 0: not connected: Connection refused
debug1: channel 0: zombie
debug1: channel 0: garbage collecting
debug1: channel_free: channel 0: unknown (remote did not supply name),
nchannels 1
debug3: channel_free: status: The following connections are open:

debug3: channel_close_fds: channel 0: r 12 w 12 e -1

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here, getting your IM clients to connect to a server on the tunnel or using the tunneled machine as a proxy to the server ?