Crazy exploding Flash Fills

This happens to me a lot - I type some stuff and I want to give it a shadow, so I break it apart, copy it and attempt to enlarge the copy by expand filling (modify-shape-expand fill) and only by one pixel. It then expands some of it and screws up the rest. What was ‘artists portfolios’ is instead a slightly larger 'art.;‘s p0r,./-ios’ - is this just flash 5 showing its age?

and can someone confirm that masks do not work with scrolling text boxes - potentially I thought because the text only exists inside the actionscript… whatever - it ain’t working.

Come on guys - masks and scrolling text boxes - are they mutually exclusive??