I've used putty for a while now but I've always had this problem that bugs me. If I run anything that is ncurses based (like pkgtool in slackware, or trafshow (or pretty much all those other network monitoring utils), make menuconfig, etc) it doesn't show the entire screen properly. It's like it only goes accross the screen enough to change the last character it has to and then just goes down to the next line. so i see a lot of black lines scattered about the screen. I figure this is an optimization thing but all the administration is being done from the LAN. Also it works fine from my linux laptop and just ssh into it. Any ideas?

BCE (Background Color Erase) is your problem Its a terminal thing. Don't ask me the history and such, but its a feature you have to turn on in putty to make it support it.

Solution:
In Putty, Terminal options, check "Use background color to erase screen"

Should solve your problem...

Good luck!