No response to ESC until another keystroke

[John O'Gorman]

Hi everyone

Recent versions of Linux (Redhat 7.3 +, SuSE 9.0) seem to not respond to 
teh ESC key.

Runing xterm based programs (xterm, konsole, kterm, gnome-terminal, etc) 
applications respond correctly to the ESC key the first time it is hit, 
but all subsequent ESC keystrokes are ignored until another keystroke is 
made.

vim behaves correctly in all cases. My problems show up under Informix 
4GL programs (including the supplied Informix apps: dbaccess, isql, etc)

Does anyone know if this is is a curses bug - or a window manager, or a 
display manager problem - or a configuration isse of some sort?

I've Googled for this problem but found nothing. On other mailing lists, 
several respondents have confirmed the systems but have no solution.

John O'Gorman