This is very strange. Neither of these problems seems to be happening to me anymore. The one significant thing I can think of that could have affected the behavior (somehow?) is that I installed se_21000300_linux64 on this system to see if these issues happened there.
The Mint 18.2 system is a new system - I was migrating to it from an older Mint 17.1 system (both are VMs). The 18.2 system never had SE installed on it until I installed the SE2017 Beta 2. I decided to install SE2016 on it to see if the problems occurred there as well. I couldn't repro the problems with SE2016, but now I also cannot repo them with SE2017 B2.
Is there any sensible reason that could be?
Some other things I have installed or remember configuring in the past week or so. I can't imagine that these would have any effect:
- the pss search utility from
https://github.com/eliben/pss.git - the zsh shell (but I'm not actively using it - I only installed it and tried a couple of test commands in it)