ssh hangs without password prompt -- works in root or other accounts

The reason your ssh client hangs for your account but not for other accounts (root) is probably because there is something wrong with your ssh-agent. Either that the ssh-agent is not running or that its configuration is wrong in some way.

To have a confirmation of that, you can try the following:

unset SSH_AUTH_SOCK
ssh [email protected]

If you're then asked to input the pass phrase to your ssh_key it means you have an issue with your ssh-agent.

See also my post on this related question.

Can I interest you in reverse DNS?

Essentially, the client is doing the reverse DNS on the server, or vice versa.

I propose a test:

Disable DNS lookups on the server by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config and making sure "UseDNS" is set to "no".

Run "service ssh reload" (or whatever causes your ssh daemon to reread the config), then try again.

Incidentially, it doesn't happeen to finally prompt you after a long period of time, does it?

Another thing you might check is looking at the contents of /etc/hosts on the server to make sure that nothing is wrong there.