I am seeing some strange characters in the function-key menu at the
bottom of Midnight Commander's screen when I - as su root - run it in
an rxvt. They have a certain unicode, utf-8, double-byte look about
them, but I don't really know what I'm looking at. 

Also, mc gives the following messages - whether su'd or not - when
launched, and I think perhaps one of them, about codepages, may be a
clue here:

# mc
params.c:OpenConfFile() - Unable to open configuration file "/etc/samba/smb.conf":
        No such file or directory
		
Can't load /etc/samba/smb.conf - run testparm to debug it
load_client_codepage: filename /usr/X11R6/lib/codepages/codepage.850 does not exist.

I have left a couple of screenshots of this behaviour here:

http://www.ruptured-duck.com/netbsd.html

tia for any light shed on these or any other mysteries!

-- 
Bob Bernstein