Color before alpha?

1

I am experiencing a weird phenomena; if a color script performed after .alpha then the alpha is disgarded… if it is performed before then alpha works ok.

for example

 
    letter.alpha = 0.5; 
    colorTransform = letter.lettervalue.transform.colorTransform;
    colorTransform.redOffset = Math.round(startcolor.redOffset+frcol*(endcolor.redOffset-startcolor.redOffset));
    colorTransform.greenOffset = Math.round(startcolor.greenOffset+frcol*(endcolor.greenOffset-startcolor.greenOffset));
    colorTransform.blueOffset = Math.round(startcolor.blueOffset+frcol*(endcolor.blueOffset-startcolor.blueOffset));
    letter.transform.colorTransform = colorTransform;

doesn’t work properly… it sets color but resets alpha to 1 (100%)

 
    colorTransform = letter.lettervalue.transform.colorTransform;
    colorTransform.redOffset = Math.round(startcolor.redOffset+frcol*(endcolor.redOffset-startcolor.redOffset));
    colorTransform.greenOffset = Math.round(startcolor.greenOffset+frcol*(endcolor.greenOffset-startcolor.greenOffset));
    colorTransform.blueOffset = Math.round(startcolor.blueOffset+frcol*(endcolor.blueOffset-startcolor.blueOffset));
    letter.transform.colorTransform = colorTransform; 

    letter.alpha = 0.5;

works ok … both color and alpha applied properly.

In itself not such a problem, but,

The thing is that at the end of a certain loop i need to 1 more time do a colorscript to set the object in question back to the origal color but not perform any .alpha on it… it needs to keep the .alpha it has. Unfortuantely with that final color script it sets alpha back to 1. Obviously I can put its then-current alpha into some temp var and re-apply it right after the color script, but it all seems to make little sense. Is there maybe something simple I missed?

P.