Custom Field Trouble

I had upgraded WordPress 2.5 to 2.5.1 about a week ago and I am running Camino and Mac OS X.

When I make a post, I need to set up one custom field. It’s called ‘lightbulb’ and the value can change depending on what I want. The value from ‘lightbulb’ is taken and searched through a custom query to find two other posts. When I get the post going, I put the title, content, excerpt, and set up the custom field. When I click Publish and check the blog, I get the new title, content, and excerpt to show up, but I set up the template to see if the ‘lightbulb’ value is getting passed to my variable and it is not. I tried several things and several different ways of publishing the post. (saving first then doing the custom field, saving the content, excerpt and then saving after custom field then publishing) I checked my MySQL tables in the wordpress database and nothing new is getting saved to the postmeta table. Should I roll back to the previous installation to make this work? Or do a completely new installation and start fresh?