While this is probably not screen's doing, maybe somebody in this forum has the necessary expertise to suggest courses of action that I am not aware of.
I am running Slackware 15.0. If I invoke xterm I have the capability of scrolling up and down in the terminal emulator by using Shfit + PageUp and Shift + PageDown. If I invoke screen within this emulator I retain that capability in the resulting shell.
If invoke xfce4-terminal (the Xfce terminal emulator) I have the same scrolling capability. However, after invoking screen from this terminal emulator the scrolling capability is not present any more in the resulting shell.
When brought to their attention, the Xfce people did some hand-waving while concluding, in essence, that this is expected behavior for all terminal emulators - which is obviously not right. I really think this is an issue (a feature?) with xfce4-terminal, but I wonder whether somebody with a deep knowledge of the ins and outs of screen might suggest screen tweaks to get around it?