dear all, i have found the culprit. And it's the least likely guy causing this. It's the LAN driver. My mobo is a Asus P4P800.

See http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~kewley/...k/sk98lin.html

great! are the permissions resolved too?

Look for a log file on the windows machine. It may say why the connection failed. E.G. time out or connection refused. I should clarify my earlier response. I can use putty from a cable modem connected computer. But from our corporate network at work, putty will not work but ssh32 will. Since neither works for you, the problem be be in the linux servers ssh setup. So check those logs also, on whether a connection was refused and why.