Console problem

[m.roth2006 at rcn.com]

Ok, I come in a few minutes ago, and go to log into one server. Um, nope, no response to putty. So I pull up a VMware infrastructure client, which gets me to a real console... and a problem I've seen before: I want to log in, but as I try, the console log overwrites *everything*, and apparently interferes with my login. Is there any "easy" way to actually log in, without, say, rebooting?

   mark