Thanks very much for the report. I'll work on resolving the issues
once we've received reports from everyone. One clear issue however is
that you apparently never did have the ipythonrc file for CASA.
For IPython, the way things work  is you have a .ipython *directory*
in your home directory which will also have an ipythonrc file (note:
no '.' in front - the start up messages you saw were IPython creating
that directory and initial ipythonrc file). You can override the use
of this by having an ipythonrc file (again, no dot in front) in the
directory that you work in. I've attached the recommended ipythonrc
file; can you please pop this either in your working directory or in
$HOME/.ipython and verify that it solves:

1) wrong prompt - should be CASA [n]:
2) autoparenthesis not working - should work
3) ipython log not started
3) casalog not started - should come up automagically, an additional
logger can be
  invoked with casalog (e.g., if you accidentally closed yours)
  casalog? should also return the shell alias

--
4) !cd does not work in IPython. It is *the* shell command that can
not be executed with the prefix '!'. This is noted in the cookbook on
page 18 (Section 1.3.4). It's an oddity of IPython.
If you remove your '!' from the cd commands, it will behave as you intended.

- I have tested the above as myself on rubyps - i.e., without an
.ipythonrc directory, it behaves exactly as you indicated; once that
was made, I copied over the ipythonrc file and things worked as
expected.