ASCII BEL character displayed by screen, horking terminal display

When I start screen from gnome-terminal on Ubuntu 10.04.3, and do
something that produces a bell (e.g. hit tab twice from within bash),
I'm getting an ASCII BEL character displayed literally by screen,
rather than a visual or audible bell.

$ echo $TERM
xterm
$ screen -c /dev/null
$ echo $TERM
screen
$ ls /tmp/^[g  # typed <TAB><TAB> after /tmp/

screen in gnome-terminal renders the ASCII BEL as a little square with
1's and 0's in it (e.g. binary) to represent the control key, followed
by the g. When I cut and paste into emacs, I see it as ^[g. After this
bell shows up in my terminal, the ncurses position for the line is
screwed up (off by some number of characters), especially if I use a
key sequence to move to the beginning or end of the line. Starting a
new command or 'clear'-ing the screen "fixes" this issue.

I've tried numerous combinations of bell*/vbell* and
terminfo/termcapinfo settings, including the apparently widely used:

terminfo xterm 'vb=\E[?5h$<200/>\E[?5l'
termcapinfo xterm 'vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[34h\E[?25h:vs=\E[34l'

...but my .screenrc doesn't seem to be particularly relevant here (as
exhibited by the 'screen -c /dev/null' above). Spare a clue as to how
I can get the bell to do something useful like flash the terminal
display? (No audible bells, please. :-)

Thanks,
- Dan