I have noticed that when logged on as root and using VI, VI will open a work file that belongs to a different user. So, user A is editing thesis.tex and root is going to edit /etc/hosts. Root will see the work file of user A's thesis.tex. I think that there is a bug in the temp files for VI but I dont have the time to chase it down with the start of classes at hand. Richard Wong
Is this happening to you always or occasionally or rarely? (I use vi as root very often and have never seen this.)
One more possibility is that your machine has been compromised by a cracker. Consider, as a first investigative step, running the command rpm -Va And looking through any problems it reports.
If anyone can reproduce this with any version of vi, please re-open this bug with a description of what you did to recreate the bug, and include the exact version of vim you are using. Thanks!