OT:emacs/tramp ssh method problem

[Peter Risdon]

Not strictly FreeBSD, so apologies. But I'm stuck with this.

I use emacs with tramp/ssh to edit files on remote machines (local & 
remote both FreeBSD, 4.9, 4.10 and 5.2.1). In the middle of a session on 
one remote machine, a save operation threw up an odd question: which 
encoding method to use for the file. Then emacs hung.

Now I can't log into this particular remote machine at all using emacs. 
It starts authenticating, and loading remote shell stuff, gets to 
*tramp: Sending the Perl `mime-encode' implementations.*, and hangs there.

I can ssh into this machine from the command line without any 
difficulty. I can also use tramp/ssh to access files on other remote 
machines from emacs.

I did notice that small (85bytes) binary files called *-*, just a 
hyphen, had been created in the home directories of accounts to which I 
had tried to connect from emacs on this problematic machine. But I 
deleted these files while trying to fix the problem and this behaviour 
has not been repeated.

I have no idea how to debug this, and would be very grateful for any 
pointers.

Peter.