Vim starts with garbage characters in the command window

Question

Running Vim creates some odd characters in the command window. Here is what was given to me:

:. 2501; 0 ° C

I use the same .vimrc on two machines, one Ubuntu, one Scientific Linux, and only the one that works on Scientific Linux acts this way.

Does anyone know about this? It’s just a shame that you need to delete these characters before you get started.