no shell command hist on arrow keys

[Harry Putnam]

I've seen no mention in recent posts about this:
After booting (test2) and arriving at an X desktop (gnome)
my xterms or gnome-terms have no shell history buffer.  Nothing comes
up on the arrow keys.

Further, I find I cannot scroll up inside vi[m] or emacs, just down.

Readline packages are installed and show no problems with:
rpm -V readline
rpm -V readline-devel

Haven't ventured into test3 yet but wondered if anyone has noticed
this same problem?