Ooookaaay.
Once again, I think we've gone off on tangents without attention to the original thread.
The problem is that when running screen in a terminal window, screen tends to intercept the scrollback buffer. This means that whatever you've configured for the terminal program is often irrelevant, as is the terminal program's normal scrollback function.
While the ability to use screen's buffer-edit function does give you a scrollback, it also transforms the expected, accustomed behavior of the terminal; the ease of scrolling back with a mouse wheel or familiar keys.
Somehow, putty overcomes this, and manages to buffer and allow scrollback even within screen sessions. Wouldn't it be nice if common Linux/Xwindows terminal programs did as good a job of integrating with this common Linux utility?