Mike doesn't seem to be paying attention to this somewhat dated thread but in case anyone else is noticing.... it seems the erase setting is different than previous xterms. I get erase = ^? looking at stty -a output.
I think this means that the backspace key in emacs -nw will not function as expected (without some elisp correction) but will call `help' instead.
Very disconcerting when coding at full speed.
One can set erase to ^H in .bash_profile or similar but then there is the need to keep up with that setting when changing users or etc.
I'm guessing the old defualt was `erase = ^H' but not really sure. I don't see any settings in my rc files so apparently it didn't need any setting before.