Feature palette and link to thickness

I created a palette feature recently and have run into something that
doesn't seem to work the way it's supposed to. I'm wondering if
anyone else has run into this.
The feature is for sheet metal and would be used on multiple material
thicknesses. I create a base flange, add a blind cut extrude that is
linked to thickness, pattern the cut and save to our network folder
for palette features. When inserting it from the feature palette, I
get a message telling me that the linked value in the palette feature
has the same name as an existing value in the target part. It goes on
to say that I can click yes to link the feature value to the value
specified in the part or I can click no to rename the value in the
feature with a suffix. I click yes because I want the cut depth to be
the same as the material thickness. I click next in the edit sketch
dialog box that comes up and click finish in the change dimensions
dialog box that comes up after that. The feature is placed but the
value for the cut and the part thickness are not linked. If I go to
the dimension and right click to link values I see thickness (the
desired thickness of the sheet metal part) Thickness-2HP} and
Thickness-2pæ¨, which are both the thickness value of the feature.
I could solve this by not extruding to thickness and manually linking
the value or specifying the cut go up to next but I'd prefer if
SolidWorks linked the values automatically like it says it's supposed
to do.
Steve