Up arrow at an empty prompt in ksh93

This is a request for explanation or pointer to documentation.

I'm a KornShell93 (ksh on Mac OS X or ksh93 elsewhere) user. I like the shell for its relative simplicity as an interactive shell and for its scripting capabilities, and I've been using it since the code was made more free in 2000. I use it in vi editing mode, with both the vi and viraw options set.

There's a neat feature in ksh93 that allows you to start typing a command on the command line and then press Up-arrow to get the latest matching command line out of the command line history. I can find the documentation for this and how it's bound to [count][A in vi editing mode, no problem.

However, if I press Up-arrow at an empty prompt, it first gives me the most recently executed command, then it starts cycling through whatever command prefix I had previously looked for. This annoys me no ends.

Example:

I execute these three commands:

$ ls -l
$ ls -ld test
$ ls -ld testdir

Typing ls and then pressing Up-arrow three times will cycle through them in opposite order.

Later, with many more commands issued, but no history searches and no ls invocations:

$ cc -o testrun mytest.c
$ man strncmp

If I now press Up-arrow once, I get man strncmp. If I press Up-arrow again, I get ls -ld testdir and then ls -ld test rather than the command cc -o testrun mytest.c and then the previous before that.

I'm looking for pointers for how to "fix" this so that Up-arrow without typing anything on the command line beforehand cycles through the most recent history without trying search for a previously used prefix. Even a pointer to somewhere where the behaviour above is documented would be nice.

EDIT:

The ksh93 manual says

[count]k Fetch previous command. Each time k is entered the previous command back in time is accessed.

/string Search backward through history for a previous command containing string. String is terminated by a RETURN or NEW LINE. If string is preceded by a ^, the matched line must begin with string. If string is null, the previous string will be used.

[count][A If cursor is at the end of the line it is equivalent to / with string set to the contents of the current line. Otherwise, it is equivalent to k.

This does not explain why I first get man strncmp (as if pressing k) and then get ls -ld testdir in my example above. With the text of the manual in mind, I would expect to get ls -ld testdir on the first press of Up-arrow (which would be even more annoying, by the way).