I use screen all the time. In fact, I'm typing this now in a terminal started through screen. The defaults are very inconvenient though. I highly recommend at least using these.

In your ~/.screenrc

# This is such a better default than Ctrl+a z.  You only need to use
# ctrl+z when you background tasks.  If you use Emacs or anything like
# emacs key bindings, then ctrl+a is a horrible default.
escape ^Zz

# Disable startup message
startup_message off