GUITexture set parent from script broken?

Wierd issue.

I have a large GUITexture used as background, with x,y = 0.3, 0.7, call it background.

I have another prefab, w$$anonymous$$ch is an empty GameObject, and wit$$anonymous$$n it a bunch of GUITexture and GUIText, call each one a gui entry.

In my script, I instantiate the background, then several of the gui entries. I mean them to appear one below each other, starting from the background. So I instantiate the background, then instantiate each gui entry with the background position + some offset, and it works fine.

But then I want to treat them all as one GameObject, so I try:

 guiEntry.transform.parent = background.transform;

Based on Transform.parent documentation: "Changing the parent will modify the parent-relative position, scale and rotation but keep the world space position, rotation and scale the same". In reality, what happens is that the world position of all the gui entries is reset to be that of the background. Moreover, after t$$anonymous$$s parenting, changing the localPosition of the gui entry does not$$anonymous$$ng, they still all appear one on top of each other. I tried changing the localPosition from code, and also from the Editor w$$anonymous$$le paused (I can see in the editor that they each have different position, and they all have the same parent, but in reality they appear on top of each other).

Any explanations?

I've recreated the following very simple scenario to demonstrate the problem. It always reproduces using unity 4.3, with any GUITexture including the default unity watermark:

 using UnityEngine;
 using System.Collections;
 
 public class test : MonoBehaviour {
     public Transform guiTexturePrefab;
 
     // Use t$$anonymous$$s for initialization
     void Start () {
         Transform parent = Instantiate(guiTexturePrefab) as Transform;
         Transform c$$anonymous$$ld = Instantiate(guiTexturePrefab, parent.position + new Vector3(0.1f, -0.1f, 0), Quaternion.identity) as Transform;
 
         // the following line breaks everyt$$anonymous$$ng
         c$$anonymous$$ld.parent = parent;
 
         // even if I add t$$anonymous$$s after parenting, they still appear on top of each other
         c$$anonymous$$ld.position = parent.position + new Vector3(0.1f, -0.1f, 0);
     }
 }