Possibly, we've tried the download on a few machines and everything seemed to work well.

Placing items works by scrolling through your hotbar then pressing E again when looking at a surface. It's possible you where not close enough to to place it. 

Their where some bugs with the hotbar early on that we thought we fixed, but in case they're still around you can try picking the items up in a different order, or scrolling when you only have one item.

let me know if you still have the problem