Can't figure out what's up with screen on one of my machines.

jhawley at vulpix:~$ screen -S 1   ... and I get a blank screen with "New 
screen ..." at bottom for a few seconds.  Screen appears to be running, 
but none of the Ctrl commands work.

If I log in as root, it works fine.  This is Ubuntu 10.4.

What might be up?  "screen" is such a generic name, its hard to google 
for. :/

~jh