I got to the bottom of this one finally after watching AUSST do it's dance last week...
While synchronization is working, the cursor moves every time the status is overwritten. You can see it move from left to right one character in the status as the last character is replaced to make the spinner.
It appears that an error occurred and the cursor just happened to be somewhere in the middle of that line of text when it printed "error".
The logs themselves are much more helpful than the status (or even the status returned when AUSST finishes properly) so I recommend examining the logs after each run of AUSST.
Hope it hepls someone!
-Brian
