I just installed Red Hat 9 on a dell600sc. I have sshd started as a service. I can ssh into the box as root ( I know I am wrong but it is inside the firewall ) from ssh on Mac OS X or secureshell on W2k . It works fine.
Using either of the machines, ssh in as user gary it validates password and then I get connection reset by peer.

I google for hours to no avail.
my host.allow and host.deny are only comments.
my sshd_config jas allowusers gary.
So obvious stuff: sshd running, ports available, etc are not it since root can ssh in.

TIA

Welcome to LQ
I've got a theory...

Try, as root, to change this users password:
passwd - gary
And then try logging in as gary again. Short of that, can you post up any relevant log files that contain information on this:
/var/log/syslog
/var/log/sshd/current (depending on what logger you have..)

Col