I used to use Gnome-terminal for the same reason, but it doesn't behave great with screen sometimes, and has some other small issues.

I'd recommend mrxvt, a superset of rxvt. It's lighter, has support for tabs, fonts, transparency, etc.

http://code.google.com/p/mrxvt/wiki/Main

Are you talking about the backspace issue? There are some old patches from ubuntu that show how to fix it (though they they don't seem to use them themselves anymore):

https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/vte/+bug/29787/com...

rxvt and friends gave me problems using truetype fonts. They have their own code for calculating widths which gives the wrong answer even when it's monospaced.

I wish there were more terminals. It may seem like there's a lot but they are derived from a fairly small number of roots and they inherit all of the bizarre behaviour.

I use 'terminator' a very nice terminal based on Gnome Terminal. If you like GT definitely you should try terminator as well.

For those that don't run gnome you can run vte directly, just download the source and compile the demo app.

There are tons of vte based terminals. Terminal of xfce, for example, which is quite "lightweight".

I don't have xfce installed either. The sample app is perfectly complete, you don't need a GUI for a terminal.