This is a really weird interaction.
Fire up gnome-terminal.
Have at least two tabs.
In one tab, start screen. 
In screen, start irssi (this is the only program i've found that shows this
bug). Make sure you join a relatively busy channel, so that irssi updates
the screen fairly regularily. #commits or similar should be fine ;-)
Change to the second tab. After a while change back to the first tab.
irssi should be in one of several states: entirely blue screen, with part
of the status bar, or the bottom line, updated whenever some one speaks on
the channel, with an entirely blank screen above that.
Sorry this is extremely woolly, but it's the best i can do.
I'm going to attach a screenshot of the blue screen state.