Putty and Window Titles
Annoyingly, the bash profile on RedHat resets the window title as part of setting the prompt -- by using the \033 escape sequence. This is pretty annoying, since I set the title of my windows in Putty and I don't want them changed just because I did a sudo over to another user.
Fortunately, you can tell Putty to not allow these title changes. After you create the connection, go to the Terminal, Features configuration section and check the "Disable remote-controlled window title changing" feature.