"Cannot spawn ssh" when connecting to Github, but ssh -T [email protected] works?

Question

I am having a hard time getting Github (+Netbeans to work).

I want to use ssh with git (on Windows 7) to, e.g., commit or clone a project, but I keep getting this error message :

$ git clone [email protected]:USER/PROJECTNAME.git error: cannot spawn C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\ssh.exe: No such file or directory fatal: unable to fork 

Note: For now, my GIT_SSH environment variable is pointing to C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\ssh.exe, but I have also tried C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin, erasing it entirely, pointing to putty's/plink's folder, and pointing to their executables, but still the same message.

When I test the connection everything works fine:

$ ssh -T [email protected] Hi USER! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access. 

What am I doing wrong? Does it make a difference if I do the git init in the directory in the first place?

EDIT:

This didn't help:

setting GIT_SSH to plink.exe and adding plink's path to PATH

**EDIT 2 **

result of command with GIT_TRACE=2

$ GIT_TRACE=2 git clone [email protected]:XXX/AffableBean trace: built-in: git 'clone' '[email protected]:XXX/AffableBean' Cloning into 'AffableBean'... trace: run_command: 'Plink.exe' '-batch' '[email protected]' 'git-upload-pack '\''XXX/AffableBean'\''' error: cannot spawn Plink.exe: No such file or directory fatal: unable to fork 

Answer 1

None of the answers so far worked for me. What ended up fixing this issue for me was removing quotes from my GIT_SSH variable and don't escape any characters at all, no MSYS path style (eg. /c/path\ to\ putty/plink.exe). Just enter the path normally, Git handles the quoting.

set GIT_SSH=C:\path to putty\plink.exe 

That's it. When using GIT_TRACE you can see that the variable gets quoted in the resulting command so:

1. the added double quotes change the string passed to the command and

2. the path is wrapped in single quotes so the spaces are ok.

Hope that helps someone.