I'm using vi on linux - vi --version gives:
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.2 (2008 Aug 9, compiled Apr 16 2010 12:47:47)

A few weeks ago, for no apparent reason, every time I use vi the entire text is flashing, is highlighted in green and yellow seemingly at random, and each line ends with a visible $ sign. Although the editing keystrokes work it's totally unusable because the text is blinking the whole time!

At the bottom of the screen is the following:

N ? crontab.2siKb4/crontab ? ? unix ? latin1 ? crontab ? 2% ? a 1:1 

This leads me to suspect it may be some kind of character encoding issue, but I'm not sure what could have caused that, or how to correct it. Searching the web didn't really seem to come up with much.

If anyone could help me to get vi back to normal please I'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance,
Ian.