Just to check... are you sure your named levels are BEFORE your numerical levels?
You can't have:
100:test!*@*
500:test2!*@*
stick:test3!*@*
You need to put the named level (stick) before the numerical levels (100 and 500) or else $level shows that "stick" is the last numerical level of 500. I'm not sure if that's supposed to do that, but my test showed that to be the case on 6.21.
