Cannot SSH from OS X Mavericks to Solaris server Well, this is embarrassing. It was a case sensitive issue. Prior to posting the -v output on this site, and probably due to looking at this problem for too long, I forgot the fundamental rule of case sensitivity !! Was trying to log into the Solaris server using an all lower-case user name. The user id on the Mac has an u/c alpha first character (remainder is l/c). Tried it and it worked.
Just need to find a hole deep enough now but thank you to all who tried to assist.
Try and ssh into the solaris machine with the following options

ssh bob@solaris -vvv -F /dev/null -o PreferredAuthentications=Password


There are a couple of things to look at:


Does your mac have an ssh config file? If so, bypass it with -F /dev/null  
Do you have multiple ssh keys? If so, select the correct one with -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa  
What protocol are you using? Check the sshd_config file on the server to see if you are using protocol 1 or 2. 
Have you installed / restarted the ssh-server daemon on the server? 


Tail the logs on the server to see what errors it prints. Not sure about solaris, but on CentOS the logs are in /var/log/auth/audit.log