Q: strange behavior of ssh in cygwin?

[john]

hi
I have windows XP with cygwin and freebsd 4.8 release server. whenever I try
to connect to freebsd sshd from cygwin using this command
ssh -l john 10.0.0.50
it asks
password:
3 times then asks me password from the server
john@10.0.0.50's password:

but i've enver saw that behavior if i try connect using linux or freebsd on
client and server,
anyone have any idea which man page or doc I need to examine?
thanks
john