gEDA-user: Multiple symbol gschem components

I'm trying to created a component for gschem where two separate symbols are used to represent a single component because of the large number of signals involved. I found a recommendation in the archives suggesting that this could be accomplished by simply setting the reference designator the same for both symbols in the schematics. I have done this and it appears to have worked when looking at the geda netlist output. However, the gnetlist drc2 checker is giving me the following errors:

1. Checking Duplicated References - Error: Duplicated Reference U1

2. Checking Duplicated Slots - Error Duplicated slot of uref U1

U1 is the component for which I have two symbols and have set the reference designator of each to U1. The slot attribute is set to slot=0 for both symbols. Am I doing anything wrong or is this just a little glitch in the drc checker?

I used grenum to initially set the bulk my reference designators. This seemed to be the way to go since I had other components that were slotted and had U1 which used multiple symbols for which I manually set reference designator values prior to running grenum. As I understand, grenum would not overwrite the preassigned reference designators like refdes_renum. Oddly, grenum seemed to work fine with the exception that it assigned U1 to an additional component even though U1 had already been used for my multiple symbol component. Initially I thought this was the cause of the duplicate references above but manually changing the erroneous U1 assignment didn't fix the duplicate references problem. I wanted to point this issue out in case there might be an issue with grenum.

I'm running the February 2007 CD version of gEDA.

Thanks for your help.