I recently started renting space on a remote server so that I could work on a project. I found that a relatively painless way to access it on a windows machine is through PuTTY. However, there is one thing that has always irked me when using it: for seemingly no reason random characters are sometimes inserted at the cursor.

Most of the time it is just a single tilde, but rarely it spits out what looks like some escape sequence ([[^8 or the like). It will only occur when I am focused on the window, whether I am typing or 20 feet away from the keyboard. If left for long enough, it will spit tildes at random intervals (average is about 1 minute).

Finally, this behavior seems to be inconsistant when running programs such as nano or the mysql interface: in nano, instead of inserting tildes, it will set marks (ctrl-^); in mysql, lines will become un-editable.

My question is this: Has anyone else experienced this sort of behavior in PuTTY? And if so, what can be done to prevent/correct this behavior?