It doesn't seem to realize that ansi.sys doesn't support blinking text: if ( termattrs() & A_BLINK ) mvwaddstr(win,5, 1, "This terminal supports blinking."); else mvwaddstr(win,5, 1, "This terminal does NOT support blinking."); This (from testcurs.c) is evaluating true, even though it is definately not on this machine. (I'm not sure, but I remember reading up on ansi.sys & the behavior may be inconsistant on various machines or something; this is a P166 running win98 SE with ansi.sys loaded in the config.sys compiled on VC++ 5)