Gnome terminal key mapping changes?

[Sean Millichamp <sean compu-aid net>]

I have a somewhat technical question about gnome-terminal 2.x and it's
terminal emulation/keymapping behavior versus gnome-terminal 1.x.  But
first some background:

I have a 25 workstation network running Red Hat Linux 7.3.  All the
desktops are using the Gnome 1.x that ships with RHL 7.3.  Their primary
application is an old terminal application that runs on the server which
they currently use gnome-terminal to access.

This application is quite old and has a very broken idea of how
terminals should work.  Instead of integrating colors into the menus,
prompts, etc. the authors decided that it would be easier to just
recreate terminal definitions and where the codes for bold, blink,
underline, etc. are defined include the appropriate color codes
instead.  They only supply these custom terminfo files for Windows users
using a custom version of Paraterm designed to work with them.  Ugh.

So for Gnome terminal 1.x I took the terminfo definition for xterm
(which was the closest match) and merged in the color codes from one of
their supplied terminfo entries and all was well.

I am now looking at upgrading them to Red Hat Linux 8.0, primarily for
the much enhanced desktop experience.  I was just testing a RHL 8.0
workstation against their application and found that none of the arrow
keys worked as expected any more.  They all print letters in the form
fields.  I presume that something had to have changed in the way
gnome-terminal handles control codes but I have no idea what or where to
look.  Does anyone know if the terminal that gnome-terminal emulates has
changed?  What it has changed to?  Where I could go to find all the
control character definitions?

Also, no matter what I do gnome-terminal seems to grab F1 for help. 
Even when I tell it to disable all keybindings.  This seems to work for
F10 but not F1.  This is totally unacceptable in this situation as the
application uses F1 through F10 and needs all of them.  Is there any way
to get it to not do that?

I don't mind reading source code but I'd rather not have to patch it or
deviate from the RH shipped gnome-terminal though if I have to I will. 
I hope that there is an option I can pass gnome-terminal to get F1
released and some reference for the control codes so I can try to
recreate a new terminfo for this braindead application I have to deal
with.  The whole terminfo system is somewhat opaque to me - until I
encountered this application it has always Just Worked for me so I never
needed to figure it out.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Sean