I only know the answer to the first half of your problem. The 'w' variants of curses functions are the "wide" versions . They are for double-wide character support (such as some characters in Asian languages and portions of Unicode).

Most users whose language doesn't have double width characters won't need this functionality, so distributions typically provide separate "normal" and "wide" ncurses packages. Debian, for instance, has libncurses5 and libncursesw5 (and then the complementary -dev packages).

Not having these functions doesn't mean your ncurses install is broken; it is to be expected for most users. I'm sorry that I can't explain the rest of your problem.