I can't explain what you're seeing, but I have a couple of ideas. I believe it's possible to be sent a redirect when you include global.php, so maybe you're redirecting to one of the vb scripts (and that's responsile for the second call?). Another thing is that when you include global.php, your current directory has to be the vb forum directory or it won't work correctly (because some files are included by relative path). Also it's written to be included at the "global" level, so if you're including it inside a function things also won't work correctly unless you declare a number of variables to be global first (I wish I could tell you which ones, but I don't remember).
ETA: Here's a thread where we talked about the global issue before:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=2270753