Strange behavior of xterm after upgrade to 7.1 from 6.9

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

Hi,

I am trying to iron out some rather annoying problems after migrating from 
X version 6.9 to version 7.1 (slackware-11.0 to slackware-current).

One of my main inconveniences is that there is an evil interaction between 
xterm (apparently due to some keymappings, but what do I know, actually? 
Nothing, in fact) and Midnight Commander. In case it is relevant, I also 
run fvwm2, which over a period of years I managed to customize somewhat to 
fit my tastes.

The problems:

The mapping in Midnight Commander of Alt-s to the function of searching 
down a directory for a filename is broken now. What is supposed to occur 
is that a highlight occurs which has on its left a / character. One types 
in the first letter, or the first two letters, or the first three letters, 
or even the entire filename and then one hits enter. If a file answering 
to the description is found, the highlighting moves down to the first 
filename in the directory which fits the description. What happens now 
instead is that a lower-case o character with a single accent mark on top 
of it (Hungarian long o character) appears on the command line below, at 
the shell prompt.

The second problem is that some of the bindings in the Midnight Commander 
bindings file are now broken and do not function. Some do continue to 
work. For example, the association of .dvi to xdvi continues to cause a 
processed TeX file to come up for viewing. So they are not all broken. But 
the associations of the suffixes .ppm and .jpg and .jpeg are broken. I 
have them mapped to the ImageMagick command "display" and now nothing 
happens at all if one hits enter with the highlighting on top of such an 
image file. However, the command if typed down on the command line works 
as it should. By the way, I open lots of image files because I do driver 
support for USB still cameras. So it happens on a daily basis that I might 
deal with about 20 raw images from a given camera and then have two 
programs, one with a minor variation on the other, to process these raw 
images. Then, obviously, one would like to see which one of these programs 
is doing a better job with these 20 photos, not to mention with the photos 
which were taken yesterday under different lighting conditions and also 
processed with the old version of the program. So I do open lots of image 
files, as I said.

Neither of these problems comes up if I use an rxvt instead of an xterm. 
In an rxvt terminal, the Alt-s mapping does what it should, and all of the 
extension bindings that I have tested also work. Why then do I not switch 
over to rxvt for all my work? Well, I also use the Midnight Commander's 
internal editor mcedit. And if I open mcedit in an rxvt terminal, then the 
cursor is an almost-invisible black inside of the blue background, with no 
obvious way to change the color of the cursor inside the editor window 
back to the expected light grey. So the option to use rxvt instead of 
xterm also seems to lead to undesired consequences.

I would appreciate any help in tracking down a way to fix these problems.

Thanks in advance.

Theodore Kilgore