Strange characters appearing when I use the Ctrl and Arrow keys to navigate
What is in your ~/.inputrc and /etc/inputrc? The minimum to get those keys working is, I think:
# mappings for Ctrl-left-arrow and Ctrl-right-arrow for word moving
"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word
"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word
"\e\e[C": forward-word
"\e\e[D": backward-word
If you have these in /etc/inputrc, the file needs to be included from ~/.inputrc, so check that it has the following line:
$include /etc/inputrc