[F5] Struggling with variables

I’m trying to piece together a flash powered site (my first designed in flash) and I’m trying to use variables to help in the navigation. I’m having each button set a specific variable to a different value when they are pressed, the movie then plays an animation specific to the scene that’s open and checkes the value of the variable to know which button was pushed. I had it working well, but then I moved the actionscript into one of the movie clips I had on the main timeline in an effort to clean up the timeline as a whole. Now the the whole thing has gone to hell. I’m thinking it might have something to do with parent and root directiories (something I’m still don’t fully understand). Do I need to do something to variables so they carry over into movie clips? Or are they just out there all the time freely accessable by all?

Please Help!