Of course the program does Tgetent at the appropriate moment. It's that some systems do weird things when $/ is undef:

use Term::Cap;         
$/=undef;              
my $t=Term::Cap->Tgetent ({TERM=>undef, OSPEED=>38400});
__END__
failed termcap lookup on xterm at - line 3
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So I had to stick a local $/ = "\n" there as a quick fix.