Big problem and I need some suggestions

I am working with a fairly large .swf with a lot of code and I am trying to limit the amount of code as much as possible, using as many iterative loops as possible. I am using a lot of code inside of each movie clip also (I have two types of mc on the stage), and here is where it gets interesting.

Inside one of the mcs I have included a piece of code with the help of this forum that allows the user to both click on and drag the mc about the stage. However when the user clicks on the mc I want two things to happen, firstly I want it to position itself in the centre of the stage, already accomplished (with the help of the forum - same thread), and I want a number of the other mcs to be positioned around it in a circular pattern. Now I have two main problems with this… first of all I am using all of the above code inside of a single mc and I am confused as to how I can actually take the other mcs and place them around it, calling it from inside the mc that is, another problem is that I am using an xml file to load data dynamically into the mcs, I am doing this from the main timeline and then as I said before using iterative processes to fill each mc with their relevant data. Inside of this xml file I have a number of items, each having a tag called owner, what I want to happen is for the user to click on the mc in question and then for each mc that is “owned” by the mc in question to then be positioned in a circular pattern around it.

If I haven’t explained this properly or if anyone is confused then please let me know, but this problem has been getting to me quite a lot over the past two weeks and no matter what I have tried, it won’t work…

/Conor