I do a lot of mysql work on partitioned tables, and when I do SHOW CREATE on them, it tends to print out really long lines of dashes to illustrate the ASCII alignment of the fields on subsequent lines. gnome-terminal doesn't handle this well *at all*, hanging every instance of gnome-terminal while trying to figure out what to do.

I can reproduce this pretty easily. Go to any terminal that has more than the current screen worth of history, and run this command:

for i in {0..10000}; do echo -n "----------"; done; echo

That will generate a single line with 100000 dashes on it. Good luck trying to scroll your terminal after that!