Prestige Class driving me nuts... need a pointer or 2

[rmcgrath]

I apologize ahead of time if this has been asked before, but I have searched, and searched to find an answer I thought would be available...

Here is the problem:

I have created a prestige class. All of my pre-reqs are working perfectly, feats and abilities are also working perfectly... only problem is that when I add 8 levels of the first class, select all of the appropriate pre-reqs for the prestige class, and then succesfully assign the first level of the prestige class to the hero it suddenly unlocks 9 levels of the prestige class. For some reason the abilities are being unlocked based upon the total character level instead of just the levels of the prestige class. This really seems to me that this should be a silly check box or something I am overlooking, but I have been working on this for days and haven't had any luck. Can anybody point me in the right direction for a simple fix on this?

Thanks!