note that, in MDL-17469 I reverted and highly similar patch that was causing real problems with dates being rolled incorrectly.
More yet, since yesterday's (20091006) weekly build, we have introduced one checksum method to avoid restore execution if we detect that something is missing in the required restore objects (bug MDL-18469).
And any patch like the commented in MDL-19859 can easily break those checksums. So I wouldn't recommend to apply it at all.
So I just would try with yesterday's weekly to see if the problem is fixed. If problems continue in your side, then we'll need to find the cause and fix it. But definitively, introducing modifications in the restore.php script isn't the correct way (knowing how restore internals use to work).
Ciao