Googling "warm air from car vents" comes up with tons of results of people having the same problem on all kinds of makes, models and years of vehicles.
The heater valve thing seems to come up often as the likely culprit. More interesting is one of the threads I read where one of the responders said he went out of his way to make sure his future vehicle had "a valve to keep hot coolant out of the heater core"...
A '99 Civic he said, just like MY previous vehicle('00 Si) which is also similar to my RSX...both of which I said I never experienced this crap with
So...Honda apparently has the knowledge/hardware to prevent this shit(2+ decades ago!), but Subaru and many other car companies are still behind the curve, as expected, or they just don't give a shit as much as Honda does.
Still waiting for "winter" here. Compressor on during cold/dry weather is an absurd notion. I'll take perma-crickets over this if the former comes to pass.