issue with pg_restore

Hi list,
I'm trying to restore a backup into a database with a new name

the dump was done on a 8.4 server with:
pg_dump -F c -f bakfile olddb

i'm trying to restore it with:
createdb newdb; pg_restore -v --jobs=4 --disable-triggers
--no-tablespaces --dbname=newdb bakfile
or even just:
createdb newdb; pg_restore -v --dbname=newdb bakfile

It doesn't work .. pg_restore claims to be creating tables, indexes,
etc. and there are no errors in the output. It only takes a few seconds
to run (the file is ~250MB).
In newdb, all the tables in the "public" schema are missing. All the
functions and triggers were created though, tables in a non "public"
schema were created but don't contain data. Tried on 8.4 and on 9.0 with
the same result.
I turned on server statement logging and don't see statements that would
create the missing tables, there are alot of BEGIN/COMMIT statements
with nothing in between.

the only way i got it to work was to run:
pg_restore bakfile | psql newdb
which loads everything just fine but i was hoping to use parallel
restore to speed it up.

any ideas?

-nigel.