Ah ing hell. I just wrote up a nice long post describing the problem in detail, and the forum ate my go cookie, or something. So excuse this brief rewrite.
“Not logged in” my ***. 
So I’ve got an interactive animation. And it’s got a shooting gallery. And all the things in it – characters, items… – are basically buttons – you click on them, (with a custom ‘rifle’ cursor) and they play(); (“fall down” – scaling + motion tweening).
Tonight I decided it was too simplistic, and beefed it up a bit.
One thing I worked on was a firing animation for the rifle. This involves turning the ‘rifle’ cursor into a movie symbol, giving it kickback+bulletTrail animations, setting it to stop() by default at frame 1, and putting a transparent button right behind the registration point – so basically, at all times, there’s a hidden button following the mouse around. Anytime you click, the cursor movie symbol plays. Voila, kickback.
Problem? Indeed, at all times, there’s a hidden button following the mouse around. I can’t click on on the items and characters in the shooting gallery anymore. D’oh.
Help? 
I don’t know if one exists in flash, but the best solution (IMO) would be a ‘universal’ listener – one which detects any mouse clicks at all, not just on a specific button – I could then ‘remotely’ trigger the firing animation, and the characters/items, no longer blocked by an invisible button, would work again. Does anything like that exist?
