[RESOLVED] broken man pages

Does anyone know what would cause man pages to become corrupt?
All of a sudden one (and only one) of my user accounts has problems displaying manual pages in the terminal under Gnome.

If I hit ctrl-alt-F5 and login to a non-windowed session then the man pages display correctly presumeably because its not trying to do any fancy text formating.

The text in the man pages contains missing spaces and broken escape sequences in the plaintext.

Does anyone know what could cause this? Could this be a broken environment variable or something? The root account doesn't suffer from this problem.

You might check the $TERM environmental variable, which specifies the terminal type and from that what options (such as colors, formatting, etc.) are supported.

Under gnome terminal, my $TERM is set to xterm.

I'm blaming this on a generally unhealthy box. I'm moving over to CentOS this evening so this is no longer a problem.