intermittent tramp operation.

[Eric S. Johansson]

for a very long time, tramp was stable with my Windows Emacs installation.  Now,
sometimes it asks me for a password, sometimes it uses user agent and most of
the time it just locks Emacs up so bad I have to kill it off using the Windows
task manager.  sometimes when Emacs locks up, my virtual machine also locks up, 
but not always.  Additionally, when I was trying to set some python mode
parameters with the configuration interface, Emacs also locks up.

I haven't changed Emacs
I haven't changed putty
the only change I made in the past few days was installing Dragon
NaturallySpeaking 9.5.

suggestions?