Thanks for the advice, and the problem did go away. That still leaves the question open as to why perldoc and man ouput was formatted correctly under gnome-terminal and xterm, and not under konsole (and putty over ssh, apparently). It still looks a lot like Redhat had a workaround for Gnome and not for KDE, since it worked correctly in those environments before updating.

Update: added text in italics above.

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Allolex