minor subplot and doc issues

Hi mpl-ers,
while working on some multiple subplots I noticed the following:

1) multiple subplots in a column overlap slightly (xticklabels and the
following title), depending on font size I guess; is this known or how
could this be fixed?

2) the set xticklabels example on p.27 of the current user guide doesn't
seem to work; after looking at the axes.py source I figured out that
  mysubplot.set_xticklabels([])
should work, and it does; on the cookbook page I then found another
solution:
  setp(get_xticklabels(), visible=False)
which I haven't tried. I'm a bit confused by these different approaches
(although I guess it's a feature of mpl); for example wouldn't it be
more natural to just be able to do
  mysubplot.xticklabels = []
which however doesn't work, IIRC.

setup is mpl 0.90.1 with numpy 1.0.3 and python 2.5.1 on windows xp

thanks,
sven