CentOS - Sep 2006 - interactive bash v3 sessions and yank-last-arg

The readline function yank-last-arg (normally called through M-. or M-_) 
in bash3 work somewhat differently than in older bash versions for 
commented lines:

For example, if I run in bash

echo 1 2 3
#echo a b c

then Esc-2 Esc-. produces alarm on first try and '2' on second try;

So I can recall commented history lines using Esc-p, but not the arguments 
using  Esc-.

In older versions yank-last-arg worked on commented lines as well, which 
was very handy.

Does anyone know, how to enable that 'old' behaviour in bash?