ssh using rsa pub key authentication

[police at terrabox.com]

Hi,
I generated a user pub key and placed it on the system I need to access in
authorized_keys2. If i ssh using root it worked just fine w/o prompting
for pass. but if I try to ssh to a user on that same system it won't work.
The same exact setup for both root user and the user is done. anyone has a
clue. 
in both user's .ssh authorized_keys2 contains id_rsa.pub and 644 is for
authorized_keys2
by the way am using openssl.0.96b and libgcc3.0.2 and openssh2.9p2

thx.