Window SSH tunneling (Port forwarding) on to the remote host

This is from a Windows 11 system with the SSH server running on a Windows Server 2025 using the OpenSSH software included in the distribution.

I’m trying to create an SSH tunnel to a remote host and forward into that remote host, and this doesn’t appear to be working. I tried with both plink and the OpenSSH client (ssh). Have others experienced this issue?

        -L 5104:hostname:1024 user@hostname

In the -L parameter string, we have tried both the hostname and localhost, and neither works. From using the Windows firewall logging capability, it appears we never see a connect request to the remote port (1024) when a connect request hits the local port (5104)

It all works fine if we try

         -L 5104:hostname:1024 user@another_host &
         -L 5104:another_host:1024 user@hostname

which demonstrates the tunnels and port forwarding do work…

Just fails on the same host or localhost in the -L parameter definition.