Well, here I am, feeling stupid

I would like to set up SSH.
I've installed putty and puttygen here on my Windoze box.
I've created a private / public key pair for putty (SSH-2 RSA).
I've added the private key to putty.
I've copied the public key from the publickey file I saved from puttygen.
As far as I remember from way back then, I have to remove the leadin and leadout of the key, and only have they key itself on one line.
Well anyways, I tried a lot of different formats, so could someone please tell me the setup step by step.
I tried searching the WIKI, but I didn't find an answer, I also tried searching the forum, and found a lot of irrelevant posts , I didn't find any ssh for dummies post.