@Vinnie
Could it be that you are confusing two different versions of appbrowser?
(1) appbrowser-cli is the ncurses version. Does not require X-windows, but needs to be loaded (which you seemed to have done).
(2) appbrowser is the GUI version which requires X-windows to run. The error message you quoted indicates to me that this is what your were trying to do, without X-windows running (try startx to get that started).
My guess is you wanted to do (1), but actually did (2).
Note: If you have trouble to get X-windows running after booting from MC 2.4.1 someone else needs to step in. That is not how I operate TC.