(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.