Okay, the problem is solved.
When you join a channel, part of the packet is your stat string - it has your stats. For starcraft/warcraft2/warcraft3, it's pretty simple because it's human-readable, usually looks like a set of numbers separated by spaces, where each number has a meaning like "number of wins" or "ladder rating." Diablo 2's stat string is harder to parse because it's binary - instead of being human readable, each byte of the statstring can have a value between 0 and 255, and that's what has meaning.
The reason the bot didn't know what level you were is because it was not properly converting the java String object in to a byte array because it was intepreting the high byte values to mean unicode characters, which you can't simply dump in to an array the way I was doing so.
Unfortunately, I never saw the bug until I started messing around with the bot in Linux, because this is a quirk of the Linux JVM I'm using, and it doesn't occur in OSX with Apple's JVM, or Windows with Sun's JVM.
In any event, the bug is fixed - I wont be able to get the new code up on to the server until tomorrow.
