I'm sure it doesn't normally do this. Had to fsck after installing WInston 3. Got lots of: ./ [rest of output on this line] Should be one line, surely? I think it overwrote something at the bottom of the output, but I can't be sure. I don't want to crash the machine just to test that, either :)
fsck usually puts out a spinning / using backspace, etc. interleaved text will sometime leave the screen in the state that you describe.