<p>The default setup for the <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> DVCS on Windows with <a href="http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/">tortoisehg</a> uses <a href="http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.63/htmldoc/Chapter7.html#plink">plink</a> and <a href="http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.63/htmldoc/Chapter9.html#pageant">Pageant</a> to manage SSH keys when you are using ssh as the transport protocol for mercurial. That’s most likely the right choice for a normal Windows…

<p>Admittedly I’m  not the biggest fan of <a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a> - I prefer <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of <a href="http://msysgit.github.io/">Git for Windows</a> is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a…