What am i missing? (weird artifacts in terminal)

Question

I dont really know how to describe this too well, so i've upload screen shots for comparison. One of my systems seems to display weird artifacts in place of what would normally be straight lines. This causes problems with lots of things not aligning properly, and it also looks really ugly.
I use the same programs on both computers, and i dont recall doing or installing anything special on the system that works fine.With some programs I will only have issues if im using screen. For example, mcabber will display just fine if i'm running a single terminal window or ssh session, but if i try to run it in screen i will have issues with the lines not displaying correctly and get a pretty much unusable screen. Other apps will look ugly regardless of if they are in screen or not (but they will look worse in screen)
For an example i used midnight commander, which has this behavior outside of screen,
Here is it looking normal on my desktop:
And here it is looking messed up:
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

UTF8 support is right there. You get the weird characters, which means that mc is correctly outputting unicode, but the terminal doesn't display it as such. The problem here is that even your shell starts with the default locale, which is non-utf8. That's easy to check, just "echo $LANG" after starting a terminal locally (on the computer with the problem).
If you get en_US.utf8 then I'm completely lost, expert help is needed
Otherwise, the setting in rc.conf is overridden somewhere, most likely in your .bashrc or something similar. Grepping for LANG= in your home dir will hopefully tell you where exactly. If you use the same user locally and through ssh, then that explains why you get the problem from remote too. The config containing LANG=en_US is loaded just the same, no matter if you log in remotely or locally.