With emacs 22, apparently someone got the idea that it would be a good idea to drop you into a splash screen rather than your edit buffer when you say "emacs -nw filename". Sending an edit command, such as control-L to refresh the screen, shows you the buffer you wanted to edit. Good plan.
Anyway, I finally found the right Google search, and found out how to turn this behavior off. "(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)" in your .emacs will kill the splash screen off altogether. (Nice inverted variable sense, by the way.) If you just want it when you're not editing a file, it gets more complicated, and I haven't figured out a good plan. See this discussion for details. Note, however, that files seem to get opened after the .emacs is run, which invalidates the technique that discussion suggests. (B)