See if loading ncurses-common and/or ncurses-terminfo helps.
No, no change.
urxvt is the default terminal in LXDE where mc works fine as expected. The trick is to start urxvt with '-tn rxvt' command line option.
This also works in Xfce4. Thanks.
BTW: The equivalent in Eterm is "--term-name rxvt" and works for me in Xfce4.
BTW2: IMHO, MC looks best in Eterm. The typeface is not so bulky. Same for manpages.
BTW3: In my experiments I found Terminator in the repo. There I can change the character encoding on the fly. That's cool, because I often visit computers with other character encodings. Tabbing and grouping are also very nice features ...
BTW4: The special character "€" (german locale de_DE@euro), only works in Eterm and Terminator.