Vim won't open if "execute pathogen#infect()" in .vimrc

Question

I recently found out about vim-pathogen, and installing vim plugins on my Mac and on remote shared Linux machines has been working great. However, I can't get vim-pathogen working on one remote shared Linux machine I use. I tried using vim-pathogen on an external Linux cluster, but if I have the recommended execute pathogen#infect() line in my .vimrc file, Vim suddenly won't even open if I clone a plugin repository in my .vim/bundle directory. Below is a copy of one of my sessions where I tried to get vim-pathogen working. I had the same problem with other plugins, so it's not just vim-autoclose. How do I go about getting vim-pathogen working? I have Vim 7.0 on this machine.

lindsb@rrlogin:~$ ls .vim
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ cat .vimrc
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload ~/.vim/bundle && \
> curl -LSso ~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim https://tpo.pe/pathogen.vim
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ ls .vim/*
.vim/autoload:
pathogen.vim

.vim/bundle:
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ echo -e "execute pathogen#infect()\nsyntax on\nfiletype plugin indent on" > .vimrc
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ cat .vimrc
execute pathogen#infect()
syntax on
filetype plugin indent on
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ vi
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ git clone https://github.com/Townk/vim-autoclose .vim/bundle/vim-autoclose
Cloning into '.vim/bundle/vim-autoclose'...
remote: Counting objects: 326, done.
remote: Total 326 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 326 
Receiving objects: 100% (326/326), 97.85 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (132/132), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ ls .vim/*
.vim/autoload:
pathogen.vim

.vim/bundle:
vim-autoclose
lindsb@rrlogin:~$ vi
*** glibc detected *** vim: double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x00000000197ee800 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib64/libc.so.6[0x326da714af]
/lib64/libc.so.6(cfree+0x4b)[0x326da757ab]
vim(clear_tv+0x4e)[0x453c7e]
|      |      |
|      |      |
V      V      V
[ a bunch more lines of similar error output ]

Answer 1

As Christian Brabandt suggested, my issue was caused by an old version of vim. I installed locally by cloning the vim git repo then executing ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/vim && make && make install within the top directory of the vim repo. ($HOME/usr/vim is where I wanted vim installed) The new vim worked great with the pathogen plugin installation method, but it opened really slowly. By analyzing the startup time with vim --startuptime out.log I found that setting up the clipboard was taking up most of the startup time. Following the instructions in this post I found that vim -X opened much faster, so I added set clipboard=exclude:.* to my .vimrc file. Now everything works great.