I have upgraded to Fedora 7. Looks good!

Unfortunately a menu based application that normally uses termcap no longer handles curser operations properly with an xterm misbehaving, eventually locking up.

Installations are nearly all rpms and ncurses is installed as an rpm. I have version ncurses 5.6 and it is installed in /usr/share/terminfo with a symbolic link in /etc/terminfo and /usr/lib/terminfo . I have had this trouble in the past and solved it by backing up to a previous version of ncurses but this time there so many installed FC7 applications that are dependent the new version of ncurses it is not viable to solve the problem this way any more.

I can change the menu application to use terminfo instead of termcap but instead of locking up and misbehaving it outputs strange characters on the screen like so

23;1HEnter order number, (N)ext else (Q)uitC________23;40H?12l

Anyone got advice as to my best solution. The best solution I have so far is change to another Linux flavour.

What terminal program are you using? The default terminal in Fedora is gnome-terminal. Have you tried running the application in an xterm?

Good thinking but - no banana.
I use KDE rather than gnome and the terminal window is an xterm. But just to make sure, I ran an xterm and tried again and observed the same results.

Googling about I found some references that ncurses was no correctly implemented by Redhat but provided no helpful workarounds....you never know if these "experts" are right anyway. I may need to make up another box and try Ubuntu

Fedora tries to use the upstream products as much as possible (their patches are usually bug fixes pulled back to stabilize the product), so any distribution that uses the 5.6.x revision of ncurses will probably cause you a problem. In other words it may not be a distribution issue (there are no bugs against ncurses in Fedora/Redhat's bugzilla), but rather a change in the 5.6 revision that is causing your problem. The application may have been taking advantage of one or more bugs which have been resolved.

If that's the case, your choice is to stay on an older distribution or to update the code for compatibility with the new version.

I found a workaround/solution to get the screen based application working under the new ncurses.

Looking through termcap I tried setting the terminal window to once of the other possible terminals.

In the end I set
TERM=xterm-r6; export TERM
and it all started to work. I haven't tested it thoroughly yet and there may be glitches but so far it looks okay.

So it wasn't the ncurses change, it was a termcap change. Good to know; thanks for the follow-up.