Synaptic - debconf: TERM not set

[Chris Capon <abyss@pathcom.com>]

After a recent upgrade (testing distribution), Synaptic started showing 
this message:

  debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Dialog
  debconf: (TERM is not set, so the dialog frontend is not usable.)
  debconf: falling back to frontend: Readline

for every package or upgrade being installed.

I do not get this message when running something like dpkg-reconfigure 
from a terminal window.

Synaptic creates its own console window so I don't know how to set the 
TERM environment variable.  Is there some way to set it or is Synaptic 
broken?

This happens on two different systems.

Thanks,
Chris.