Why am I sending the publickey?

I'm trying to re-establish SSH communication between two of my hosts. I
can use SSH to login between the hosts as a normal user, but not as the
root user. Root logons between the hosts used to work, but I may have
screwed up and regenerated the keys. PermitRootLogin is set to 'yes' on
the remote host. When I have no /root/.ssh/id_rsa file, I can log into
the remote host as root with my root password. However, when I
regenerate the id_rsa key, in preparation to sending it to the other
host, I get these lines in 'ssh -v:'

[root@xxx .ssh]# ssh -v xxx.xxx.xxx
OpenSSH_3.9p1, OpenSSL 0.9.7a Feb 19 2003
<snip>
debug1: Found key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:1
debug1: ssh_rsa_verify: signature correct
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
debug1: Authentications that can continue:
publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Trying private key: /root/.ssh/identity
debug1: Offering public key: /root/.ssh/id_rsa
Connection closed by xx.xx.xx.xx
[root@xxx .ssh]#

I don't understand why it's trying the publickey method.

On the remote host, I've removed the lines in /root/.ssh/authorized keys
for the host I'm coming from, and restarted sshd, 

I'm at a loss. I suspect that this is an easy problem for someone who
knows SSH better than I do, and I'm hoping you all can help me. Thanks
in advance for your advice and suggestions.

-Kevin Zembower