Can't save and serve private files

I've seen a couple of threads somewhat related to this issue, but I think I may have found a different element to it that doesn't fit elsewhere. When I try to upload files through the media browser, they don't appear (the whole access denied issue). If I add through the file uploader instead of media browser, they work fine. This is only a problem with a private filesystem, it works fine when using a public filesystem. I am wondering whether this has much to do with the different styles the images are being assigned. For instance, one of my gallery pages want to serve files from files/private/styles/... but no files were ever created in the styles directory. If I manually (via sftp) add the file to the corresponding directory, it appears just fine, indicating to me that the files are being managed by drupal just fine but the media browser is failing to upload its files to the correct locations. Could anyone either confirm this for me or ideally find a solution? This issue makes much of my site inoperable since I need to use a private filesystem. Thanks!