Msysgit git no longer finds ssh keys

Question

I have an older Windows XP laptop on which I recently upgraded git to 1.8.4.msysgit.0, in order to benefit from the new cmd\git.exe instead of the older cmd\git.cmd for scripts.

After this upgrade, git asks for a password for its operations (such as cloning), where it did not before the upgrade. None the of the ssh keys were changed in any way.

The strange thing is that both

"c:\Program Files\Git\bin\ssh.exe" [email protected]
"c:\Program Files\Git\bin\git.exe" clone [email protected]:/path/to/repo

work, but

"c:\Program Files\Git\cmd\git.exe" clone [email protected]:/path/to/repo

does not.

Background information:

1. I tried setting %HOME%, but this did not help.
2. I did the exact upgrade for a win7 computer, without problems.
3. %PATH% includes the cmd folder of the git installation, not the bin folder.

Update1: After messing around a bit, I noticed the ssh command also asks for a password if the %HOME% variable is set. It was set using set HOME=%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% which resolves to c:\Documents and Settings\username.

Answer 1

Old versions of msysgit apparantly kept their ssh keys in the Git installation folder (c:\Documents and Settings\username\.ssh). There were 2 files in this folder (id_rsa and id_rsa.pub) that were not present in the ssh folder in the home folder. After copying these, the problem was solved.