Midnight Commander problem

["Wagner, Kurt" <Kurt Wagner frontiercorp com>]

Hello,
   I have an annoying problem that I have not been able to find any help about on the internet or mention that it is happening to anyone else.  However, it happens on both Fedora CORE 3 installations that I have.
   I use a telnet application from my Windows 2000 client to connect to the Linux hosts.  At first I've gotten a garbled screen when typing MC but I figured out that if I change my environment variable from LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to LANG=en_US it looks great in telnet with TERM=vt320, even colors and menus work well.
   The problem is that when I exit Midnight Commander, it exits normally two or three times, and then it gives me a message about a zero screen dimension.  Once I see that, when I go back into MC, the screen goes blank and shows the following message at the bottom:

libgpm: zero screen dimension, assuming 80x25.

    It is completely locked up at this point.  If I disconnect and then reconnect I can sign back in but going into MC just locks up the session again.  If I reboot the Linux host, MC works fine for another two or three times.
    If I use VNC or the console to connect and I have TERM=xterm then MC works fine even when it doesn't through telnet.  I have tried playing with stty but have not had any luck with that.  I would be much happier if I didn't have to reboot the server throughout the day as I use MC quite a bit.  My version is below.

power>mc -V
GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.1
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, cpiofs, ftpfs, fish, undelfs
With builtin Editor
Using system-installed S-Lang library with terminfo database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
With support for X11 events
With internationalization support
With multiple codepages support

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you.
Kurt Wagner
kurt wagner frontiercorp com