curses mystical error output

[skip@pobox.com]

I have a fairly simple curses app which is giving me this error:

addstr() returned ERR

I'm trapping it and continuing. I can see that *some* of my addstring calls
succeed. This one happens to be

screen.addstr(r ow, 39, "|")

where row is 3. After the screen was cleared two other calls to addstr
succeeded. What's wrong with this one? Can I get a more heplful message
out of curses somehow? FWIW, I am running on a Mac from a Terminal.app
window which tells me it's an xterm. I am ssh'd into a Solaris host with a
command like

DISPLAY=:0 ssh -C -Y -X remote-host

I tried simplifing the ssh command down to

ssh remote-host

but I still get the error. I tried setting TERM to "ansi", "vt100" and
"dumb". Ansi and vt100 failed with the same error. Curses refused to run
on a "dumb" terminal. I tried commenting out the particular line (it's just
drawing a boundary between the left and right halves of the window, so I can
live without it). A later addstr call fails.

Any suggestions? Do I need to followup addstr with some sort of periodic
flush() call?

Thx,

Skip