Remote xterm trouble

["Gary Hennigan" <glhenni@sandia.gov>]

Is anyone else having remote xterm trouble? If I log in to my Debian
laptop, running potato, from my SGI, running IRIX 6.5, via an xterm
the terminal is almost unusable. It seems to lose track of the
cursor. For example, if I fire up dselect and I start moving down the
list of choices when I get to the bottom, [Q]uit, and keep scrolling
[Q]uit appears to move to the top of the screen. A similiar phenomena
happens when I "vi" a file in the terminal or do a "man
<something>". Debian seems to get confused about how to handle the
terminal. In the case of man I get almost continuous underlining and
reverse-video in areas of the man page that shouldn't have this type
of highlighting.

If it weren't for the fact that this was working fine up until I did
an apt-get upgrade of my potato system about 1.5 weeks ago I'd rack it
up to an incompatibility between Debian and IRIX, but it was working
perfectly prior to this.

Here's the command I'm using to connect to my Debian laptop:

xterm -bg white -fn screen14 -fg black -T laptop -e ssh laptop

SSH is the only method I have to access the laptop, but I could
certainly install a telnet or rlogin daemon if that would help me find
the problem.

Once I'm logged in everything appears to be set properly, eg., 

% echo $TERM
xterm
% stty -a
speed 38400 baud; rows 25; columns 80; line = 0;
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
eol2 = <undef>; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W;
lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;
-parenb -parodd cs8 -hupcl -cstopb cread -clocal -crtscts
-ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr icrnl ixon -ixoff
-iuclc -ixany -imaxbel
opost -olcuc -ocrnl onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0
isig icanon iexten echo echoe echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt
echoctl echoke

Is anyone else in a similiar situation, ie., accessing their Debian
box remotely from a non-Debian machine, that can try to recreate the
problem?

Thanks,
Gary Hennigan