mc hang on program startup, forcing reboot to clear

[Trey Blancher <trey blancher net>]

I periodically have issues launching mc from a terminal (rxvt-unicode,
or sometimes Linux virtual console).  The program appears to launch,
but the window is mostly black save for a single cursor cell of blue
with my flashing cursor on top.  I have not tested great lengths of
time with this (I usually have work to do), but it appears to sit in
this state indefinitely.  It is totally unresponsive to keyboard
commands.  What's worse, I cannot it kill the mc process with any
signal (1-15), either as my normal user, or as root.

My only recourse seems to be rebooting the machine, but that seems
unsavory to me.  There's got to be a better way.  I can't seem to find
any logs for mc, and I don't know what's causing it to get into this
state.  Thus I don't know how to begin troubleshooting the issue.  If
I had to make a guess as to what is causing it, hibernating or
suspending this laptop with mc running may be what's causing it.  Or,
maybe running multiple mc instances simultaneously is enough to
trigger the problem.

Oh, yeah, my mc --version details:

trey atro:~ $ mc --version
GNU Midnight Commander 4.8.3
Built with GLib 2.32.4
Using the S-Lang library with terminfo database
With builtin Editor
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm
With support for X11 events
With internationalization support
With multiple codepages support
Virtual File Systems: cpiofs, tarfs, sfs, extfs, ftpfs, fish, smbfs
Data types: char: 8; int: 32; long: 64; void *: 64; size_t: 64; off_t: 64;

Thanks in advance,

Trey