mrxvt doesn't display ncurses applications correctly

[Paulo Marcel Coelho Aragao <marcelpaulo+l@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I decided to switch from xfce4-terminal to mrxvt but I can't get it to display 
properly ncurses-based applications, such as mutt or aptitude. The problems 
are:

1. Line-drawing characters, such as the ones mutt uses in threads, or aptitude 
   to draw boxes, are displayed as boxes and other ugly-looking glyphs.
2. The cursor disappears when mutt or aptitude are running.

Googling on 'mrxvt ncurses' didn't hit anything relevant. I read through all 
the documentation and noticed a reference in the changelog to ACS_ASCII 
capability, but the man page lists mrxvt.acsChars as a configuration option 
and doesn't include its valid values. I didn't find anything vaguely relevant  
to the cursor problem. Somehow I suspect that this is related to TERM, but I 
couldn't find anything related to this in the documentation either.

Here's my ~/.mrxvtrc:

mrxvt.xft: true
mrxvt.xftAntialias: true
mrxvt.xftNomFont: true
mrxvt.xftFont: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
mrxvt.xftSize: 9
mrxvt.scrollBar: false

I use exactly the same font/size with xfce4-terminal without any problems 
whatsoever.  From what I could initially see, mrxvt seems to be a much more 
interesting terminal emulator than xfce4-terminal, and I wish I can switch to 
using it, but these problems make it unusable.

Currently installed mrxvt:
ii  mrxvt          0.4.2-1        lightweight multi-tabbed X terminal emulator

Could anybody point me to some reference where I could find answers or hints 
on these problems ?

Thanks
Paulo