what version of initscripts are you running?

$ rpm -q initscripts
initscripts-3.91-1

what does your /etc/sysconfig/i18n say?

the file is empty:

$ ls -l /etc/sysconfig/i18n
   0 -rw-rw-r--   1 root     root            0 Dec  2 20:05
/etc/sysconfig/i18n

while I'd appreciate being able to display cyrillic-koi8 in the
console, I find preserving the size (60x80) more important.

Grumble. It shouldn't be doing that anymore.
Does /sbin/setsysfont look like the following?

#!/bin/sh

if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/i18n ]; then
  . /etc/sysconfig/i18n
fi

if [ -x /usr/bin/setfont ]; then

  if [ -n "$SYSFONT" -a -n "$UNIMAP" ]; then
    /usr/bin/setfont $SYSFONT -u $UNIMAP
  elif [ -n "$SYSFONT" ]; then
    /usr/bin/setfont $SYSFONT
#  else
#    /usr/bin/setfont
  fi

else
  echo "can't set font"
  exit 1
fi

yep, that's exactly what I have.

Check through your initscripts to see if $SYSFONT is assigned
somewhere else; if it isn't, it obviously shouldn't be
calling setfont.

at this point, I can't reproduce this here.
Using recent initscripts, the console stays the
same when booting with vga=ext, vga=132x43 (or whatever.)