These problems with vim seem to be related to UTF-8. I have UTF-8 disabled in Slackware, and vim works properly. To disable UTF-8, you have to pass "vt.default_utf8=0" to the kernel at boot time. Then, set your LANG environment variable to "en_US." This is a non-UTF-8 version of English. In Slackware, this is the default, but my understanding is that it is not in most other Linux distributions.
