Comment # 18 on bug 1203617 from Christophe Giboudeaux

(In reply to Dave Plater from comment #15)
> This is apparently part of mc's process of exiting to it's current directory.
> What is different between the GUIs that could cause this?

Last comment to answer this. What you see is the difference between a
interactive login shell (which reads /etc/profile) and an interactive non-login
shell (which only reads your shell configuration file)

This can be demonstrated easily, in konsole, run `ssh localhost`, this will
read the profile files and mc will behave the way you want.