phpMyAdmin

I have a database server on my local machine which is working fine, however
when I try to connect to another server - which I do not want to change the
tables on - I get the following error.

Table 'phpmyadmin.pma_column_info' doesn't exist

This is happening even though I have set
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['pmadb'] = '';
in my confir.inc.php file and have not set any of the other PMA options
(controluser, controlpass, bookmarktable, etc. are all blank).

This is only happening since I upgraded to version 3 of phpMyAdmin. I'm
using Apache 2.2 on windows XP with mysql versions 3-5 on both windows and
linux machines.