emacs/tramp/win/putty: “Fatal: Received unexpected end-of-file from server”

Short story – what (released) versions to choose:

The combination emacs/tramp/putty on Windows does not work with the released PuTTY-0.63. Use either PuTTY-0.62 or a PuTTY development snapshot, r10016 works for me.

• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ – the latest released version was fine for me: 24.3.1 – I am always happy to get the very latest released version
• tramp – as packaged with the emacs at the location just referred to
• PuTTY to be found at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
• PuTTY-0.63 faults with accesses as shown below
• PuTTY’s development snapshot does not fault for me, as 0.63 does – r10156 is, what I picked up – I am happy to try newer ones, if asked to
• Windows 7 Professional – because that’s the current company standard

Long story:

After the Windows upgrade at work (WinXP->Win7) I certainly installed the newest available emacs (i.e. emacs package) and PuTTY (0.63) as well.

Current issue: On opening a file accessed through “/pscp:SESSIONNAME:”, I keep getting this message:

Fatal: Received unexpected end-of-file from server

I tried the “/plink:SESSIONNAME:” tramp access instead, and it worked (I mean: it didn’t yield this message), but the combination tramp/plink keeps leading to corrupted (remote) files, as I described before [link], so that’s not really an option.

S.K.R. de Jong wrote [link], that the quoted message stems from an improper reaction of PuTTY, and Simon Tatham conceded the bug [link], writing the bug would be fixed with r10016.

Because I  found Simon’s statement and announcement only during my later investigations, I decided to give the older PuTTY-0.62 a try, and this problem actually disappeared. Of course I love leading / bleeding edge, but right now this seems to stand in my way. So I will have to post the scenario on some PuTTY forum / mailing list, but until that will lead to an improvement here, I shall stick to PuTTY-0.62.

When I had found Simon Tatham statement on this issue [link], I drew new hope, that a more modern version of PuTTY addressing the latest security issues  would also solve my problem – so I am giving the current development snapshot (to be found here) a chance, i.e. “r10156”. Actually I have never been eager to employ a development snapshot of PuTTY, so that is my “first“. I subscribed for the PuTTY-announce mailing list, so I shall be able to replace the development snapshot by a properly released one.

If that will not successful:

• TBD: first I shall have to find out, how exactly plink.exe gets called, so that the error message above gets causes – maybe I will have to ask the tramp support folks for help
• TBD: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/feedback.html#feedback-bugs