Using v3…
Could swear I used to just change world background, but that’s having a big effect on my lighting.
How do we get a solid color background without it lighting the scene?
You can use the light path node to differentiate between the colour you see in the background and the colour that actually effects the lighting.
Note that with this setup the colour that effects the lighting is the top (grey) one but you see the white background. The grey colour could be any colour (even an hdri) it will not be shown in the background but it will effect the lighting and reflections.
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Thanks - interestingly, while I have the background set to white (255 255 255), it’s not as bright as my white object.
Also - I’d like a white background in the viewport, but be able to render transparent. When I select transparent… the background becomes transparent 
Any ideas?
Your white object is lighted by the lights in your scene.
Depending on the intensity of those lights the white value can be above 1.
If you have a world shader that has a simple white background node with the strength of 1 any lights will add to this value.
You can turn up the strength of the “white” background node in the world shader to compensate.
Only in render preview, if you use viewport preview (with scene lights and scene world enabled) the background stays white and it will still render transparent.
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