Comment 2 for bug 778801

According to the discussion on the Gnome VTE bug linked, calling vte_terminal_set_emulation won't work either, unless it happens to be recognized as a supported emulation mode. "xterm-256color" isn't, so this solution wouldn't work.

There doesn't seem to be an obvious, clean way to fix the problem within xfce4-terminal; vte is the one holding all the cards AFAICT. According to discussion on the Gnome VTE bug, vte_terminal_fork_command_full is "just a wrapper" around some other functions, but one of those functions (__vte_pty_spawn) probably isn't safe to call by users.

Perhaps the correct solution should be for vte to revert to its previous behavior, whereby it didn't brutally murder pre-existing TERM settings when the terminal app sets them. If the upstream vte folks don't want to consider this, Ubuntu probably should.