Graphic symbols increase publishing time

I’m sure many people know this, but I have just spent an afternoon trying to work out why my Slide Presentation file was suddenly taking so long to publish or test (I thought Flash had crashed) after adding one extra symbol to a slide.

The symbol was a “graphic” symbol containing a navigation bar with four buttons, (3 static and 1 with an animated “Up” state produced by a movie clip nested inside it.

After several hours of trying all permutaions I could think of I eventually tried changing the navigation bar to be a “Movie Clip” rather than a “Graphic” and now the file publishes/tests as fast as it did before.

Like I said, the pros here probably knew this already but hopefully it will help out someone else like me.