Buttons within movie clips are disabling?!?!?

so…i’ve got these buttons in movie clips. the buttons are animated for mouseover and i’ve also got an action on the first frame of the main timeline to get the buttons to stay active when clicked on, so the view knows where he is.

the problem with this is that any time i go to put an action on the button itself to pull up an external .swf or whatever, the buttons stop animating and/or stop staying “depressed” on the active sheet.

any pointers?

thanks a mill!