stange 'colorbar' command behavior

[ppiatrou]

Hi,

I have just installed Octave 3.0.0 from the source on Ubuntu Linux 7.10.
One of my concerns from working with Octave 2.9 was that the colorbar
command did not show numbers on the colour bar. To my delight, after
making a sequence of commands

imagesc(randn(200))
axis square
colorbar

I discovered that imagesc works, axes tics are tight around the image and
the colour bar shows the numbers on it. However, after installation of a
few octave-forge packages including those for plotting: image, plot,
zenity, to my surprise, the second try of the commands above resulted in
colour bar without numbers! I have no idea what exactly happened and how
to return the things to initial state. Uninstallation of octave-forge
packages does not work. Is this a bug?

Other problems with colorbar persisting from the 2.9 are that the colour
bar does not scale to the size of image after a sequence of commands like

subplot(1,2,1)
imagesc(randn(200))
axis square
colorbar

or the command

colorbar('east')

produces colour bar overlapped with the image and behind it.

Does someone knows the ways to fix (circumvent) the aforementioned problems?
And, more generally, is there a way to produce publication quality
graphics from Octave?

Regards,
Piotr