slow ssh authentication

[Ashley Snelgrove]

I have a 4.0 box and whenever I try to remotely access the box via ssh
it takes a while to authenticate.  Once connected there does not seem
to be an issue with speed.  I've tried searching for possible causes
and have only seen suggestions that reverse-lookups may be timing out
or that on a slower machine it takes a while to encrypt and decrypt
the key.  This box is only a little over a year old has an Athlon 64
3200+ in it with 1GB of RAM and before that I had an old celeron
333MHz running OpenBSD 3.6 that did not take that long to
authenticate.  So it's likely not that.  As for reverse-lookups or
other DNS issues I'm not exactly sure how to test for that.

Currently, from the moment I enter a username it takes around 90
seconds until I get a password prompt.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ash