Setting itemdelimiter in behavior is failing

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

I have this in a behavior

put the short name of the owner of the target into tTargetAction

# contains a string like "surprise_audio"
# parse the owner

set the itemdel to "_"

put item 1 of tTargetAction into tModule
put item 2 of tTargetAction into tAction

put tAction

set the itemdel to comma
if abs(the mouseV - item 2 of sStartLoc) <= 10 then
# user tapped

result tAction contains "surprise_audio"

if I comment out this line

-- set the itemdel to comma

it returns "audio"

It is as if, within a given handler, the itemdel default to the last setting, even for constructs above that last setting that may set a different itemdel.  I knew there were caveats on a repeat for each item scenario.. but I could have sworn and "in the old days" this would have worked.

any workarounds?  is this a bug?

BR