[xclite]

I've had a difficult time running down an odd issue...

Symptoms:
When logged in under a particular username "xclite" on my Arch Linux machine via ssh, from my Arch Linux Desktop, using su or sudo to change users causes the following:
1) every time I hit enter, the machine beeps.
2) the prompt is all sorts of messed up... for example, the result after sudo su -:

;root@gossamer:~[root@gossamer ~]#

Where normally I would expect

[root@gossamer ~]#

No other user on the machine has this issue when running sudo or su, and I'm able to run these commands over putty from my Windows desktop with no issues.

Potentially relevant facts:
1) I'd connected to that webserver under the same username before from the same workstation - this is a fresh reinstall after I totally screwed a bunch of things up
2) that's actually all I've got right now

I'm all ears for any suggestions - I checked my aliases and nothing seems out of place there (the only one I have is for ls with auto colors).

[xclite]

Well, I figured this one out. I'm not going to be one of those noobs who doesn't post the solutions.

I had one suspicion that the only thing that could differ between these users was that I'd messed with the terminal settings. Only xclite@gossamer had TERM set to xterm-256color; everybody else was set to linux. By changing the ENV variable to be linux, I made the problem go away. I don't know enough about the variable to figure out why this caused issues (I suspect changing my host computer to also have xterm-256color as the terminal would solve it).

[DaneAU]

When reading your initial post i was going to suggest it may have been how you used adduser and what parameters you specified. I have also encountered similar issues at times regarding misconfiguration of users.