if i ssh to my machine from somwhere elce then everything is fine untill i

give the exit command,

normally this should return me to the local shell but for some reason i get the logout, text but the local shell never returns and the Xterm just hangs.

if i ssh to the remote machine and then ssh back to my machine everything works fine

what does it say on the server logs when you log out? Is there anything interesting in your local logs during this time? Can you CTRL-C to kill it?

You could experiment with screen. It is actually really useful for ssh sessions because it allows you to have multiple "terminals" from one ssh session. You can also detach your session and then reattach it later. This is especially useful, for instance, if your connection gets killed unexpectedly. With screen, you can reattach the session on any machine. With screen it is also easy to kill "terminals" when they hang and not have to kill your ssh session.

will have a look at the logs when im back on site to acsess the remote machines im sshing from...

no ctrl+c wont kill it, neither will ctrl+d

but SIGTERM seems to kill it without having to resort to SIGKILL


i use screen all the time,
the screen session will detach cleanly, putting me back at the bash prompt,
trying to exit that to close the ssh connection gives me the same problems as before though!