> Underlining seems a bit wrong too, as there are lots of instances where
> underlines extend from their proper positions in the body of the
> indented man page text to the left edge of the screen. Functional but
> ugly... have either of these things happened to other folks?

It didn't used to do this. Apparently a bug has crept into the console
code.
 
> While I'm on the subject, how can I set things so that I *always* have
> white text on a black background? Barring the aforementioned inversion
> of the prompt, of course. ;)

For now use dt which lets you have multiple linux-like consoles with
mouse cutting, pasting and scrolling. The blitting code used in dt
is more efficient than that of the console and it also allows you
to run with black text on white.

I suppose people use X and dt so much they never caught the bug.