Juha K Kallio writes:

>I've already tried setting TERM separately for programs linked against ncurses,
>but that gives exactly the same error. But since I'm using zsh, which is a 

Make sure that TERMCAP is unset (it was a workaround for older BSDs
where termcap lookups where slow due to the absence of terminfo or
termcap.db), if you drag some older shell profile with you from
some earlier systems, you might still have it in (I did, for example).
The presence of that variable might make curses/ncurses ignore your
TERM setting.

-- 
  Matthias Buelow;  mkb@{mukappabeta.de,informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de}