Okay.. here's the skinny.. please refrain from killing me..

Decided to see if I could swap in a new drive and retain all the contents of 
the original filesystem.. so I used pax to copy the file system (except /proc, 
which I learned was a bad bad bad thing to copy).. eventually I got all the 
files transferred with proper permissions and owners and such. System boots 
fine and does normal services .. but..

but when any user on the machine (aside from root) tries to ssh to any host 
(even the local host), they are kicked back with an error stating there is no 
controlling terminal. I know this is no bug in ssh, but I need to know in what 
cases ssh will terminate like that. I've checked all of my tty entries in /dev 
and they all appear to be functioning normally. I'm baffled. The only thing I 
can think of is if there may be some trick permission that's been tripped. 
*shrug*
I was under the impression that ssh simply tries to write to the user's 
terminal device and craps out if there is no real terminal device or if the 
device isn't writeable.. is there anything I'm missing?