Thank you! Problems solved.
I did in fact solve the problems we were having with Adium‘s install of buildbot. It turns out that because of some security features of Mac OS X, I needed to start the buildbot process from an actual Terminal window on that machine, not from ssh. You can read about all this (and much, much more!) in this technote.
A big thank you to everyone who helped out, especially Keith, Rob and Ben. 
