Default avatar conflicts with Account settings

This seems to be a similiar problem to #215349: Default user picture - but that issue is logged against imagecache profiles..

Since updating to Author Pane Alpha 3 (and hense why I am logging this here) my default Avatar no longer appears to be appearing in the author pane (on Advanced Forum).

The default still works around the site on nodes, user edit forms etc.etc. but I get a broken image link in the AP.

Is this connected to the fixes in the release notes regarding

• AP requires different path for default image than Nodes/Comments.

and

• Wrong default variable in author-pane-user-picture.tpl.php

as now, it seems to get the AP displaying the default image, I must enter the fully qualified path (ie. sites/default/files/avatar.jpg) - but that breaks all of the other places the image is displayed, it also ignores the image-style for resizing the image, and just straight up uses the massive avatar image.

If I just put the file name (avatar.jpg) then the image appears (correctly sized) throughout the site, but not in the author pane.

Catch 22!