I am working on creating some mate references for some electrical connectors.  I have two housings male and female.  I want to use mate references to help them line up when I drag them into the assembly.  Also each of the two housings has three holes for pins.  I want to be able to place pins into the electrical connectors.  It says in the help menu for mate references, that you can include multiple mate references if you use the reference name to refer to the mate reference.  So I named the mate reference for the housings have a mate reference name Housing.  Then I created 3 identical mate references called mpin in the male connector and 3 identical mate references called fpin.  I gave the female pin the same mate reference name (fpin). And the male pin the same reference names (mpin).  But the housings will not mate to each other correctly.  I drag it in and it wants to do everything but line up correctly.  Please help if you have any tips.  If needed I will paste some images to show the problems. Is it best to mate to planes, or edges, or faces?  Is it better to mate a specific type of mate first?  Sometimes I will get it to work and then I try it again and it won't work.  I noticed the tab key will the primary mate if it is not lining up correctly.  Is there other keys that will flip the secondary and tertiary mates?

P.S I am using Solidworks 2011 64 bit, in Windows 7 and I will be installing SW2012 in the near future. Also, I am using EPDM.