No, don't worry, it wasn't. I thought it was unnassigned because it was marked as new and I didn't think of looking at 'assign to' field. You need to change the two fields: assign to and status. I've changed the status to assigned. Afuna has a handy Greasemonkey script for that if you can use it: http://www.afunamatata.com/greasemonkey/

May I ask which directions you've used? Because I've written a guide for Windows people and I'd like to make it better if it leads to confusion. :)

Try hg qnew -f then. I know I've used it a lot at first because I kept forgetting creating the patch.