Bash shell prompt is displaying odd

One of my Linux literate co-workers found another way to fix this which is pretty easy:

1) SSH in and type pwd (to make sure you're in your home directory)

2) Type cp -p /etc/skel/.* ./ (copies the default files to your current directory)

3) logout and then back in again and the prompt should be back to normal.

I'm concerned about how this got messed up. I manage 10 Viprions, 6 i5800s and 40 guests and a significant number of them (If I had to guess, about 20) had lost their bash profiles for my account. My coworker's account was messed up too.

Only accounts on the Viprions and their guests had the problem. I'm interested in what caused this. I have recently upgraded the 10 Viprion hosts and 4 of it's guests to 12.1.2HF2 from HF1. I also upgraded 2 i5800 hosts and 6 of it's guests. I was using the CLI during the upgrades but didn't notice it causing this problem at the time.

It's very annoying but fixed for at least the moment. Interested if anyone else is having this problem.