Console background color changes when exiting vi, less, more, man, and possibly other programs

When exiting any of several common programs, the backgound color of the console is changed. This has been reported several times, including as recently as 2006, but no cause has been isolated. Here is a reproducible sequence of events that will lead to the failure and hopefully the solution.

1.5.24: Exiting less (381), vim (7.0.122), and man (1.6d) sets the console background color to black

When you exit vim, less, man, and possibly other applications the background color is set to black regardless of the setting in the shortcut that launches the console. The clear command returns the background to the correct color. This problem was first reported in Oct 2005 but was incorrectly