What's in your .vimrc file?
nat: http://bitbucket.org/natw/dotfiles/src/tip/.vimrcsome parts I haven't seen mentioned otherwise:  set statusline=[TYPE=%Y]\ [ENC=%{&fenc}]\ [ASCII=\%03.3b]\ [HEX=\%02.2B]\ [POS=%04l,%04v][%p%%]
  hi StatusLine term=bold,reverse cterm=bold ctermfg=7 ctermbg=0
  hi StatusLineNC term=reverse cterm=bold ctermfg=8

gives me a nice status bar with some good info  set t_Co=256
  colorscheme railscasts

best color scheme I've found yet, and I don't know how I lived before 256 colors  set noerrorbells
  set novisualbell
  set t_vb=

This might be redundant, but I hate error bells SO MUCH.  This might be even more important than "set nocompatible".  map ^P :set paste!<CR>:set paste?<CR>

in python mode at least, autoindent will usually mess up pasted textPlus the usual 4 space soft tab, autoindent stuff.  I also highly suggest keeping your dotfiles in some kind of version control.  It is definitely fun to see them grow, and I can't imagine working on multiple systems without it.