I think this is normal behaviour for 'vi' as it does not support gzipped help pages. Seems the case for RHEL too, so it is not specific to CentOS. You might want to to check the same on Fedora too ?
yes, it seems you're right.. I just figured that out in another post coming the list's way. :)
and under Fedora as root, it exhibits exactly the same behaviour.
I'm still curious about the discrepencies in the version numbers, does yours come up with conflicting numbers on the splash screen?