repeat entries in 'who' answer
 

If i say 'who' to console, i get the response:
(my username is 'avi').

Is it supposed to come up four times, and if so, why? If not, why is it, and how do i fix it?

It has to do with terminals--look at "man pts" for some leads.

(You guessed correctly--I don't know the answer....;) )

General rule: if the machine says something like xyz, chances are good that either "man xyz", or "info xyz" will help translate.
If not, try "xyz linux" on Google

'Man pts' and 'info pts' return nothing. 'man who' just gives the switches.

I know the info comes from the file /var/run/utmp. The contents of this are:
And the tildes keep going.

If i append the colon, i get something that's very non-human readable.

Through Google i find that 'pts' is a Pseudo Terminal Session, and they're used for XTerm sessions. But i can't find reason for four....

I've got four desktops, which was my first thought, but i figured this would be at GUI level, and not affect the logins details.

It normally reports each of your active logins. How many console windows, terminals and/or ssh sessions did you have active when you ran this?

You can also run the `last` command to see the listing of the last logged in users.

This is because you are logged in on several different virtual consoles. To see what processes are attached to each, you could run:
I do not see this line:
on my own system, but I do not use a display manager. I suspect that you are using xdm,kdm or gdm, and that is where this login is coming from.