I noticed if I print out a long string(char*) using cout it seems to print 1 character at a time to the screen in Windows 7, Vista, and Linux(using putty) using Visual C++ 2
Try using some endls or flushes as they will flush cout's buffer, in case the OS is caching your program's output for whatever reason. But, as Charles says, there's no good explanation for this behavior, so if that doesn't help then it's likely a problem specific to your machine.