Various forms of this error are printed in the PuTTY window, or written to the PuTTY Event Log (see section 3.1.3.1) when trying public-key authentication, or given by Pageant when trying to load a private key.
If you see one of these messages, it often indicates that you've tried to load a key of an inappropriate type into PuTTY, Plink, PSCP, PSFTP, or Pageant.
You may have tried to load an SSH-2 key in a ‘foreign’ format (OpenSSH or ssh.com) directly into one of the PuTTY tools, in which case you need to import it into PuTTY's native format (*.PPK) using PuTTYgen – see section 8.2.15.
Alternatively, you may have specified a key that's inappropriate for the connection you're making. The SSH-2 and the old SSH-1 protocols require different private key formats, and a SSH-1 key can't be used for a SSH-2 connection (or vice versa).