I am using screen and when I changed my terminal type to xterm-256color, with TERM=xterm-256color, I found that when 256color2.pl was run, the system colors palette only showed 8 colors. The bold versions were the same.
After much searching on the ncurses message boards, I found this little gem:
attrcolor b "I" # use bright colors for bold
Put that in your .screenrc and you should be all set.