ssh in emacs shell in OS X

[dfphil@yahoo.com (david)]

I am trying to get tramp working in emacs on OS X. I am using Andrew
Choi's "Emacs 21 for Mac OS X" which is otherwise working quite
nicely. (For reference, emacs responds with "GNU Emacs 21.3.50.4
(powerpc-apple-darwin6.6) of 2003-08-27" when I ask it - today - for
the version. )

However, when I try to use tramp to load a file from a local server,
it goes into a nasty loop of  "tramp: Looking for regexp" and
eventually dies.

After some Googling, I tried to get ssh working from an emacs shell.
This also fails.  After typing M-x shell and receiving a bash shell, I
type:
        bash-2.05b$ ssh me@host
and emacs replies with
        Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a
terminal
        ssh_askpass: exec(/sw/lib/ssh-askpass): No such file or
directory
        Write failed: Broken pipe
I get a corresponding error when I use the OS X default ssh. It looks
for askpass in a different directory and doesn't find it there,
either.

I don't want ssh to launch ssh-askpass to ask for a password. I just
want it to ask for my password as it normally would from a terminal. I
haven't succeeded in Googling my way out of this problem. I don't
understand under what circumstances ssh tries to invoke ssh-askpass or
how to stop it. Nor do I understand why emacs is telling me that stdin
is not a terminal.

  Any suggestions? 

   Thanks,
     David