You don't say what your button actually does, but I assume it's setting the requestscope for the searches?
If so what I would I think is happening is you're then doing a refresh on the repeat panel which removes the requestscope variables so the repeat search isn't working. Try changing them to sessionScopes (you'd then need to make sure the variables are removed for when you don't need them any more)
If it's not that give some more info on exactly what's happening