PuTTy is a fine SSH client, but how do you get a workflow managed as slickly as OpenSSH on Unix? My issues with PuTTy's management are:

1. PuTTy tools are not in my PATH (easily fixable)
2. PuTTy seems to have no equivalent of ~/.ssh, so I end have to manually choose locations for my keypairs, and then manually tell all the tools where to find them every time
3. The private key's read permissions seem lax (I might be wrong about this, I a klutz on Windows).
4. Pageant doesn't run by default (easily fixable?)
5. Other programs don't reliably find pageant

I suspect all of these problems can be fixed if I just get set my system up properly, and/or organise a nice workflow that fits into PuTTy's way of doing things. So can anyone share some success stories about managing PuTTy?