[GLLUG] Console Craziness

[Chick Tower]

My laptop, which runs Arch as well as some others, has developed a 
problem.  Many programs that use console graphics don't draw the lines 
and boxes the way they used to.  Instead of the nice lines, double 
lines, what-have-you, I get letters from foreign alphabets.  Midnight 
Commander is where I first noticed it, but it also affects elinks and 
w3m.  In fact, in elinks it also replaces apostrophes with several 
letters.  links is immune to the problem, though.  I don't recall trying 
any others console programs, such as mutt or finch.  I've tried 
searching the Arch forums, LinuxQuestions.org, and DuckDuckGo, and so 
far the closest I've come up with are things that concern terminfo and 
ANSI graphics, but I haven't found the solution yet.

So far, this affects just my laptop and Arch.  I have Arch on two 
desktop PCs, one of which has been upgraded to the level of the laptop 
when I first noticed the problem on the laptop.  I haven't caught up on 
the other desktop PC yet, but so far neither desktop PCs have shown this 
problem.  I reinstalled ncurses and aalib to see if something may have 
been corrupted or incompletely installed, but it had no effect.

Have any of you ever had this problem with Arch, or any other distro or 
BSD?  If so, how did you solve it?


                                Chick