Cygwin ssh and key files

I tried to use key files with Cygwin ssh (so I don't have to provide my password each time) but kept running into the following error:

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@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
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Permissions 0644 for '//turfclub/users/jstauffe/.ssh/id_rsa' are too open.
It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
bad permissions: ignore key: //turfclub/users/jstauffe/.ssh/id_rsa

The problem is that chmod wouldn't actually change the permissions so I couldn't get past this problem. When I searched on this I found refernces to turning StrictMode off but that didn't work for me can caused errors.

To fix this I did the following:

1. Started my bash shell
2. mkdir /home
3. mkdir /home/.ssh
4. cp ~/.ssh/* /home/.ssh
5. chmod 600 /home/.ssh/*
6. mv ~/.ssh ~/.ssh.bak
7. cd ~
8. ln -s /home/.ssh

It now works great (even in the normal Windows shell)!