Flash CS4 + Actionscript sometimes.....

Sigh... Flash, how you torment me. Sometimes, I really wish Adobe had a video school for training with these programs so it wouldn't be such a task for novices to use it.

After the good part of 1 month, I decided to get started on my assignment, the creation side at least. I've been doing some of a speicifactions/requirements document in the meantime so it's not all bad. The task is to create a family tree (which now has to be your own) using any program and have it as part of a website.

My instinct told me that Flash would be a good fit for all the tasks. Instead of making an independant Flash SWF and embedding it into a Dreamweaver page, I figured it'd be alot easier to make the Site and Application native Flash. So I have been using Adobe's Flash CS4 to try and achieve my goal. Unfortunately, in only my first two creations (preloader and Introduction Movie Clip), it already broke.

The preloader seems to break the Introduction Movie Clip. Without the Preloader, the Introduction Movie clip works. The preloader and Introduction movie clip are both part of the same SWF yet Flash seems to be treating them seperately, pulling up the TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference after the preloader. Weirder thing is, the Introduction Movie Clip runs for maybe 1/2 of a second before stopping and pulling up the Output error.

I'm not sure what's going on. My guess is that Flash thinks that there's nothing on the stage at the referenced keyframe in actionscript so it pulling up the error or it might be an Actionscript code problem or error, both of which aren't easy to fix without some trial and error. I can't really fix it because I have to sleep. My week off became a "semi week off" since I have to go to University today.
If I find out a solution, I'll be back here to let you know the results.