Help with TCL/Expect in Solaris 5.3

I'm having this problem with a very simple tcl expect script that is running on Solaris 5.3 with TCL version 8.4.7 and expect version 5.0.

below is the simplified version of the code snippet, which I think has everything to illustrate the problem, the full version is at the very bottom in case:

script simply asks for the email address, and it will accept the first line and print it back out

send_user "Please enter email address"
expect_user {
-re ".*\n" {
puts $expect_out(0,string)
}
}

When I run this program, and I'm typing in the e-mail address, every time I hit the @ (basically shift 2) character it deletes the entire line I just typed. I'm VNC'd into my Solaris server, so I tried simply telnet'ing into the Solaris server and running the program and there it had no problem. It leads me to believe there is some hotkey perhaps when using VNC to a solaris server? Ironically though, the @ character only deletes lines when I'm typing input into an expect session, otherwise, just in the solaris command line, I can type the @ character no problem.

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

full version:

send_user "Please enter email address to which report mail will be sent "
expect_user \{
   -re ".*\\n" \{
    if \{[regexp  "\\[a-zA-Z]\+@hotmail\\.com" $expect_out\(0,string\)]\} \{
        send_user "e-mail address accepted"
    \} else \{
        send_user "E-mail address is not in the right format, please re-ente

r:"
exp_continue
}
}
}