So, I finally have enough time again to restart working on my game. Thus, I upgraded to 0.8.1 stable. I am using the template that came with it. Everything compiles fine, but the images are all solid white and MenuItemFonts are not displaying correctly. The MenuItemFonts are displaying as just a square with no text whatsoever. Yes, I have even tried applying the [sprite setOpacityModifyRGB:NO]; method and it still displays as solid white. I was testing on the iPhone OS 3.0 simulator with Mac OSX Snow Leopard.
I am about to give up completely on Cocos 2D, because I have had nothing but troubles getting stuff to work properly ever since version 0.8.0. Yet, I need an 2D engine that will work on iPhone OS 3.0, so I can't go back to the older versions prior to 0.8.0.