steves, thanks for your efforts to be of help.

Can the terminal/driver handle multiple colors on a true white background? Yes. A simple "ls" command at the command line in a directory that has several different types of dir entries makes that clear.

Can Curses produce color on a true white background? Again, yes. But as far as I have been able to discover, only through the use of the non-standard color "8" (or some other number higher than 7) in an assume_default_colors() command. This code works:

assume_default_colors(COLOR_RED, 8); # True White bg! Why?
my $win = new Curses;
$win->addstr(0, 0, "Red on White");
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I can find no way to use

init_pair(...); 
... 
attron( $win, COLOR_PAIR(...) );
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to achieve some color on a true white background. And that seems to be what would be needed to give me more than one foreground color on a true white background.

If I were willing to settle for any of the 8 predefined colors as a background, I would be home free. But even the off-white color that Curses calls "WHITE" greatly reduces the contrast and readability of the display.

So in terms of the questions you pose, this all means that it is a Curses/ncurses issue. And that is the way I tried to frame the question in my original post.

Update: I have even tried multiple assume_default_colors(COLOR_SOMETHING, 8) commands -- but no joy. If you want the tutorial on how that fails under various creative strategies, I will be glad to oblige...

I have done a lot of reading and a lot of experimenting/testing and learned a whole bunch about Curses -- everything except the one thing I need to move forward. I am currently looking at other tools... Does anyone know how to get the alternate character set (with box graphics) under Term::ScreenColor? <g>