ansi terminal emulation/termcap/mscreen

Background: I support/develop an Informix application (SE 4.10 on SCO System V). Input arrays are used extensively to return multiple search results to the user. To end the input array F5 selects a row and ESC cancels the selection. I use SCO's mscreen to provide multiple terminal sessions on a PC (running NT4 but the same problem occurs with Windows 3.1x) connected via Specialix Multi-terminal Serial Adaptor. The problem is: ESCAPE works OK to exit from input arrays under most circumstances, e.g. when running mscreen on a non-ansi terminal emulation and on the multiscreen (ansi) console but all the ansi terminal emulations I've tested (and I've tried loads of different ones) have the following problem: When the input array is first displayed pressing ESCAPE prints a Q at the cursor position and the cursor moves to the right 1 character (BUT, press RETURN first, to go to the next row and ESCAPE works!). Pressing ESCAPE again prints more Qs and keeps moving the cursor but press ESCAPE twice quickly sends two escape characters! Using the cursor keys to move UP/DOWN the array before pressing ESCAPE causes the same problem except that a letter R is printed. I've played with termcap (including the three ansi ones on the iiug download page). I'm using ansi because I want the colour and function keys and is supported by Informix. Should I be be using something else? This is driving me crackers. Has anyone solved this problem or got any ideas for how to? -- -- Steve Williamson