OK i managed to solve this, the first thread in [this question][1] made me check my centos server to see if the mesg y was still in any of the bashrc files and i found the culprit in /etc/bashrc on my centos box. I was logging in from a terminal to whm from Ubuntu (whether Ubuntu made a difference i'm unsure).


  [1]: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/stdin-not-tty-4732.html