How to fix Open Solaris’s terminal

OK so I fully admit that I am new to administrating Open Solaris but I had been a user of it back in Solaris 8 days. Since I wanted to build a ZFS NAS server I figured that Open Solaris would be be a better platform choice over FreeBSD.

Anyway – I've been having a humdinger of a time getting into the groove here admin wise and its frustrating me completely.

I've got a couple of questions:

1. Am I loosing my mind or is Open Solaris seem overly complex? I haven't had to deal with any #3 in years…
2. Should I switch to FreeBSD for simplicity?
3. How do I setup the term so that it properly works with remote logins from my Windows (putty) and Linux boxes?
   1. Specifically, vim gets no colors unless TERM=xtermc which according to the community is not a bug (HA). Is there some standard way to setup the .bashrc/.profile script to consistently fix term colors?
   2. A standard way to fix special keys like del, pgup, pgdn, end etc. which don't work in any remote terms but also don't work on Open Solaris's own install of gnome-terminal.
   3. Are there some software (from 3rd party repos or opensolaris's) which help with these problems?

Please keep in mind that the reason this is important is because this is a headless server with primary administration via ssh and thus it is important to me that the shell terminal work correctly from all of the places I login from, preferably without needing special client-side settings. Ideally fixes would go in a shell script / bash script / whatever executed on account login.