Dicks in, shit out

Surprise and fear

Can you check in a terminal? If you can see them in the terminal and not in the desktop you’re missing a font. If you can’t see them in the terminal then you’ve somehow mangled them. What was the OS and filesystems you copied from?

Try putting -vvv when you connect and see what’s happening. I can imagine this happening if you have multiple identities (private/public key pairs) on the client and you hit a max retry limit. Pub key is always tried first, and it should ask for password once all the local keys have been tried.