Files copied from skel dir have 0 bytes

Hi guys,

This is quite possibly related to http://www.virtualmin.com/node/11382 but the explanation given there by Jamie doesn't work for me.
I have a skel dir containing several dirs; the main ones are public (which includes a world readable index.html file) and a fastcgi-bin dir (containing a wrapper for php and a php.ini, both world readable); both dirs are world readable. The problem is that the above mentioned files have 0 bytes when copied over to the user's account.

Here's a ls -al output:

ls -al public
total 8
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 16 Jun 6 2008 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 40 Jun 2 2008 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 87 Jun 2 2008 .do-not-delete-this-directory.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 524 Jun 6 2008 index.html

ls -al fastcgi-bin/
total 56
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Jun 7 2008 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 40 Jun 2 2008 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 87 Jun 2 2008 .do-not-delete-this-directory.txt
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 180 May 28 2008 php
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 48644 Jun 7 2008 php.ini

Any suggestions?
I could solve my problems from a "after creation" run script, but it's not an elegant solution.