hmmm are you using cinnamon settings deamon and cinnamon session ?.
On my box i am using all the cinnamon components and have uninstalled gnome settings deamon, the cinnamon and gnome versions clash.
The scripts should and do work, after all where do you think the built packages came from

Pbuilder often hangs when downloading thats why i wrote a dialog for you to retry the failed download.
Again on my box everything works, none of the problems you are refering to, but i am using a root account if that makes any difference, but doubt it.
Check you are running a pure cinnamon session ( ie not using gnome-session and gnome-settings deamon to host your cinnamon session ) and try again,
if still issues try uninstall gnome-settings deamon
There is a seperate issue though, the most recent cinnamon seems to have some issues regarding processor performance, on my 8 core ( hyper threading)
4 cores are constanty at 10-15 % , its the cinnamon process doing it, im assuming its the normal crap you get from running git versions, so i am going to compile the
release (2.0 i think) and see if its different
and dont forget to use cinnamon-control-centre rather than the gnome version
