Thank you, Connel, it worked exactly as you described.
I had to strip some extra data from the newly generated key and add "ssh-rsa " in front of it when inserting it in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys , which was pretty obvious.
Importing the key of secureCRT to putty did not work.
UTF-8 support in putty seems less broken than in SecureCRT, but it is far from working correctly :-( at first sight. Maybe I need some tweaking with linux' terminal settings, but I have no clue which selections to make.
Purodha