need help diagnosing readline issue under cygwin rxvt

[Matt Hortman]

Hello,

I'm a longtime matlab user and I've recently been giving Octave a shot
and I have to say that I like what I see.  My adviser was also
impressed and might be recommending it to his students...

I have Octave 3.0.0 for Windows installed (via the octave-forge
installer) on Windows XP SP2.

Running Octave from the installed shortcut works great.  Inside the
octave session the command line editing works as advertised (up/down
arrows, tab, etc).

However, I want to run Octave inside of cygwin rxvt (from a zsh
prompt) but when I do this, the up/down arrow and tab keys do not
behave correctly.  Up/down arrows simply move up and down on the
screen and the tab key inserts an actual tab...

In fact, running with no command line options, I get the startup
messages but it doesn't print a prompt (although I can type commands).
 I have to specify the "-i" option to get the prompt to display.
Specifying "--line-editing" as well does not change anything.

I have the latest version of cygwin installed (as of yesterday).
I do NOT have the cygwin octave package installed.
The up/down arrows and tab work correctly at the zsh prompt.
The pager (less) is also not working inside rxvt but I don't really
care about that.

I'm not sure what the next step is for diagnosing this problem.
Octave appears to think it is in batch mode when started inside rxvt.
Is this something strange with the stdin/out provided by zsh/rxvt or
readline misbehaving?  Is octave detecting that it is running inside
the console and taking actions based on that?

thanks,

-Matt