This bug has been opened here: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/17766

"For the last few weeks I've been noticing that my gnome-terminal has been
misbehaving.  I run irssi (IRC client) in screen(1) on a remote machine, which I
ssh to in a gnome-terminal window.  For the most part I can leave the
gnome-terminal alone and watch the IRC conversation scroll up the screen.  If I
leave it for too long however, the gnome-terminal window goes blank all apart
from the bottom line, which shows a single line of conversation.

Hitting 'page up' and 'page down' scrolls the irssi buffer up and down, but
doesn't fix the problem - the display stays 'wrong' in some way, missing bits of
text in places.  One sure way to fix the situation is to hit control-a four time
(which is picked up by 'screen' and causes it to switch to the other screen and
back again).  That fixes the display until it goes wrong again.

The problem only ever seems to have when I'm idling on IRC.  If I'm active it
doesn't happen.  Often I'll return to the gnome-terminal and find the display is
messed up.

I've not reported this as a separate bug until now because I don't know whether
gnome-terminal is at fault, or the remote (debian) machine.  I'll upload a
screenshot when it happens next.

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=4588
this is how the window looked when I came back to it

it happened again...

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=4589
this is how it looked a few seconds later

I didn't touch anything.  the bottom line keeps updating as people talk, but
the rest remains blank

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=4591
this is the result of scrolling up and down

You might think that scrolling the buffer up and down would fix the display,
but it doesn't.  It leaves blank bits at the top and bottom, as shown here.

Hitting control-l draws the screen correctly, but as soon as anyone speaks the
screen clears again apart from the last line.
...
> Does it happen in other terminal clients too?
...
That's a good question.  I really only use gnome-terminal as a matter of course,
but this afternoon I spent a few hours 
experimenting with xterm.

I was running 1 gnome-terminal and 3 xterms, with all 4 logged into the same
remote host, and all 4 connected to the 
screen running irssi (using screen -x multiple clients can watch the same screen).

During all that time I only saw the bug happen once, and it happened in the
gnome-terminal.

That's not very conclusive evidence really.

One thing though - all 4 windows were the same size, and so were presumably
receiving the same characters from the remote 
host - all 4 windows were 'in sync' until the gnome-terminal started to go wrong.

I will continue to investigate tomorrow - maybe with an eterm and a konsole as
well.  What other terminal emulators are 
there I could try?

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=4600
one of these terminal emulators is not like the others...

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=4601
the same thing but with a different stacking order

http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=4600 and
http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=4601 show a test I did with 6
different terminal emulators all connecting to a remote screen running irssi.

The one on the far left is gnome-terminal, and is the only one which shows the bug."