Comment 60 for bug 861268

I have also been having this bug. I have tried quite a few things to narrow it down but I could not find anything too definitive.

Basically, to reproduce it, I just go into a big php file and search for a string that will cause vim to jump around the file a lot. Every once in a while, when it should be redrawing the screen (I think...) is when this bug occurs and there will be text corruption. I have reproduced this in both xterm and gnome-terminal, so I don't think it is a problem with any specific terminal.

Also, the actual corruption that occurs is different with each terminal. In gnome-terminal it will just show the same text as before the search jumped around the file, but the cursor and half the character after it will be changed to what should be displayed. Moving the cursor up and down will fix stuff line by line. Xterm on the other hand will jump to the correct location and redraw most of the screen, however chunks of text will simply be completely missing (see attachment).

I did a few tests with xterm to try to further pin down what was causing it to fail and I think the main problem was the font. I tried using the default xterm font and color scheme and everything seemed to work fine. After changing the color scheme to the gnome-terminal scheme that ships with ubuntu, it was also running fine. However once I changed the font to Ubuntu Mono, size 13, the text corruption started. So either I was just getting really lucky or the errors were extremely rare using the normal font, or the change in font is somehow related to this bug.

And finally, I am able to completely get rid of this bug by switching from unity to unity 2d. I am using 11.10 with pretty much all default settings and the default nvidia driver. Hope this helps, please let me know if you guys need any more info!