Odd behavior in up2date xterm shells

[Harry Putnam]

 My setup:
*--
Software:
Linux kernel 2.6.7-1.494 Architecture i686
Fedora Core release 2.90 (FC3 Test 1)
Hardware:
model name	: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.00GHz
cpu MHz		: 1994.464
*--

I'm seeing something that just started happening afer my last round of
updates.  yum list updates shows:
 (all those that people are finding troublesome)  
  curl
  curl-devel
  gimp
  grip
  libcroco
  libcroco-devel
  librsvg2
  librsvg2-devel
  vorbis-tools

So I'm up to snuff on everthing else.

What I'm seeing takes place in xterm shells.  I use real xterm for my
shells and have for a very long time.  What I see is a linebreak being
inserted where it wouldn't used to have been.

Example:

[reader] $ somecmd "start typing like one might with a lis
t <= oops what happened

At character position 58 a line break happens... I've never seen this
before.  The terminal --geometry is set to 80x25.

Is this ncurses maybe... or more likely something to do with the new
terminal settings?