colorbar scientific notation exponent won't go away

Hi

I've got a square matrix and I'm using imshow and colorbar to plot it. The values are small, so colorbar naturally uses x10^-3 notation, however, when I set the colorbar location to 'southoutside', it appears the "x10^-3" remains behind the image.

I can tell this because I'm setting the image alphadata to transparent in certain regions.

I tried a workaround via changing the colorbar XTickLabel to the explicit string {'0.004, 0.008, 0.012'}, but neither of these "x10^-3" texts go away! It seems that moving the colorbar doesn't remove the old one, it just creates a new one in a new position.

Here's my current result: http://oi42.tinypic.com/20tqssw.jpg

As you can see, I've manually set the tick labels. I just want to get rid of the "x10^-3" texts.

Is this perhaps a bug? Changing the colorbar location is not moving it, it's apparently creating a new colorbar in that location and failing to delete all the aspects of the old one.

Regards, Mike