Why will minecraft's NEI search only search mod names?

A friend of mine recently made a custom modpack for the technic launcher, but when we use the NEI search function, the only thing that works for searches is the names of modpacks.

For example, searching for "open" shows everything for openblocks, which might be normal, but searching for "iron" shows only items in the iron chest mod, no iron ore, iron bars, iron tools, nothing.

I did see that normal functionality is that @ will search by mod name, but that WAILA might be overriding it. On a whim I tried a few other things and found that if I do #iron, I get what (I think) is a list of all items with iron in the name. Perhaps WAILA or another mod is changing the expected functionality... Any specific ideas?

Update It seems that the format @text is a subset search in NEI, i.e. @leg shows a list of all leg slot items. This is different behavior than I'm seeing with no prefix, searching for "leg" gets me no hits.

Update 2

#text does not appear to search for items containing that word, or at least not all items. #comp yielded compressed dirt, but not the opencomputers computers.