Thanks for your reply Stephen. I am trying one module for now, and I already tried everything you suggested. I changed the menu depth from 1 to 3, to 0 to 1, and it then showed the top level menu items just fine. I change it back and it shows nothing. And I also tried the module in the normal way without metamod and it shows the children items fine.

I am guessing metamod is reading it as empty because it can't read past the first menu level, or something along those lines. I am not sure if that could be fixed by a recipe or not. Probably a core change is needed. If you want access to my Joomla admin to play around with it just send me a message. In the meantime I am just creating a different menu where all of the parent items are aliased to the children items I want to show, and that shows fine because the aliases are top level