With a little help from StackOverflow, I got emacs over ssh working on windows. This is trivial on mac/linux, but can be a challenge on windows. dired mode works too!
To summarize:
1. Download putty installer with all the tools.
2. Put putty install in the path
3. Generate a key with PuttyGen
4. Copy public key to your server
5. Append public key to your .ssh/authorized_keys file (be sure to remove extraneous puttygen text, just get the key)
6. Load up pageant and add your private key (this can be automated on windows boot)
7. Add the following to your .emacs config
(require ‘tramp)
(setq default-tramp-method “plink”)
As long as pageant is running with your key, you can edit your remote files using the format ssh://user@server:path/to/file