Sorry for taking so long to come back to this; I had some unrelated
problems with my system.

> Please let us know if there is a useful way to generalize the workaround
> presented earlier in the thread.

Attached is against the latest git tree for org-mode a patch which I
believe does the trick. (This supersedes the previous patch against
htmlize.el).

Thanks to Hrvoje for suggesting this approach and providing the code
to reset the face attribute.

-- 
   Roland.