Emacs (nowindows) get confused about line display

[David M. Karr]

On my CentOS laptop, I have a CentOS VM that I created with Vagrant.  I 
have Emacs 24.3.1 on the VM.

I start a terminal window on the laptop and ssh to the VM.  I run Emacs, 
but I don't have X11, so it's in "no windows" mode.

Sometimes, when I start emacs on the VM, it starts up fine and displays 
properly.

Quite often, and pretty continuously when it gets into this state, it 
will start up with a blank editor view, with no menu bar, and the cursor 
displays on the SECOND line of the window.  When I then view or edit 
files, it appears that Emacs is confused about its line rendering.  The 
cursor appears at the bottom of the window, even though it "thinks" it's 
on the top line of the file I'm viewing.  I can scroll the cursor to the 
right, and it will jump back to the beginning when it reaches the length 
of the first line, and so on.

Emacs is completely useless in this state.

What can I do at this point?