Force mouse activity of button under a movie clip

hi, I have an invisible movieclip over some buttons/images. I have it so that on mouse over that invisible button the images start panning from one to the next. The thing is that these images/buttons are supposed to be clickable, but with the invisible movieclip on top I just can’t do that. Is there a way to force mouse activity on the buttons/images?

I’ve tried simply adding a movieclip to the back of the buttons/images and make the MOUSE_OVER listener on the whole movieclip that holds all the images but for some reason whenever the mouse goes from one image to the next it pauses the movement and then continues it, which looks like it identifies different movieclips (images/buttons AND the mc in the back) and re-does the MOUSE_OVER listener for each of them instead of the whole movieclip that holds all of them… annoyingly odd…

anyone? appreciate it!
thanks in advance!
T