Issue with navigation menu in multi-site installations

Hi,
If I log into a child site as an administrator with full permissions and click on the CiviCRM link, I get the full menu of choices for the navigation bar at the top of the screen: Home, Search, Contacts, Contributions etc... But if I log in as staff with limited permissions, the only choices displayed are Home, Contributions, events, Mailings and Memberships, so "Search" and "Contacts" are missing from the nav menu for "non-parent" users. It would seem to be a permission issue but I am not sure how to fix it. I also found this article on the forums: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,12216.0.html. [^].

we tried applying the patch that kiran created:
Find the module called 'multisite' which will be in it's own folder
In that folder is multisite.module
look for this line around 107
$currentGroups = _multisite_get_all_child_groups( $groupID, false );
& remove the , false
$currentGroups = _multisite_get_all_child_groups( $groupID)

but we are not sure that this was enough to fix the issue as we also had to:
truncate Civicrm_navigation, civicrm_preferences, civicrm_dashboard, civicrm_report_instance, civicrm_mail_settings and reimport from civicrm_navigation.mysql set specific to each domain.

after doing the above, the hoped-for navigation items were visible. So we are wondering if the patch actually fixes the issue.

we just upgraded our multi-site installation, which has 3 sites: parent and 2 child sites, to 3.4.alpha1. in case this helps, this is what the consultant who does this work for us said when I asked him if the fix had been incorporated into core:
"since this is a "new" civi install, and we had already patched the multisite.module file last time, I didn't compare that file against the one in civicrm svn, but left it as it was. If we use the patched multisite.module file, and build the multi-org configuration as we have been, then the menus come up without additional efforts. It may be useful for the community to know that you NEED the patched multisite.module file or the menu problem will persist. That being said, I haven't tested this install without the patched multisite.module file"

thanks for taking a look at this,
cynthia