If I do
  man man
in a Windows’ console, I get garbage on screen before I press
    -r

Contrary to
  man man
this cannot be overwritten by setting
  set MANPAGER=less -sr
.  (However, this may be overwritten by setting
  set PAGER=less -sr
)

In my particular setup, it would be enough if the bug with MANPAGER is
fixed.  However, it seems that setting the default man’s pager to
  less -sr
should be a much better solution.

Hope this helps,
Ilya

P.S.  It seems that the mailing list does not allow attaching the output!
      So I retry with a shortened version…