I finally sat down to understand a recent post by lullabot on Drush 3 remote capabilities. Its taken me a couple of hours to set up, but this will save me hours in drupal updates. Thank you drush project! My hangs were on setting up the ssh key, which I omitted at first and then realized that it was a requirement for drush. The second hangup I had was to make sure my *.aliases.drushrc.php files were wrapped in <?php ?> tags. Hopefully that helps some one else.