Segmentation fault- clear -all

[Charles Coronella]

I'm experiencing some very frustrating problems with Octave. Its behavior seems to be quite erratic. Two important symptoms:

1) Issuing "clear -all" will cause a segmentation fault. Every time. Here's the message I see:
panic: Segmentation fault -- stopping myself...
attempting to save variables to `octave-core'...
save to `octave-core' complete

2) Changes made to .m files are occasionally used. Occasionally not. No kidding. I can change a line in an .m file, and Octave keeps running the previous version of that .m file. Restarting Octave works, but do I need to restart the program every time I make an edit? That is not too efficient.

I'd guess there's an installation error, so here's what I think are the important data: Octave, version 3.0.3, configured for i686-pc-msdosmsvc. My computer runs Windows XP.

I'm open to suggestions.