I finally got this to work. The problem is that the patched versions have exactly the same version numbers as the originals. Shouldn't the versions be updated or at least the release numbers? I can understand not wanting to update the version numbers, but you should be able to call them, for instance,

hildon-desktop_2.0.18-1fix1.1_armel.deb
libhildondesktop0_2.0.18-1fix1.1_armel.deb
libhildonwm0_2.0.18-1fix1.1_armel.deb

or something to differentiate them from the original debs.

But a very useful patch nonetheless. My only wish is that it would be persistent across reboots.

--vr