HELP..as2 masking menu

Hi guys…
In need of a little help with some action-scripting, I’m creating a menu to go on a page of my site, I’m using actionscript 2 and pulling the information on the menu from an xml file.

At the moment, when i hover over the menu items they do work correctly, but every so often the mask stops half way and loses the lower items…it’s quite hard to explain but if you hover around for a minute you’ll see what i mean, here’s the test page containing my menu;

http://birdwingtesting.brinkster.net/

i’ve also uploaded the files (xml, fla and swf file) to a zip folder if that helps…
http://birdwingtesting.brinkster.net/menu.zip

The final thing is i currently only have a text description when each menu item opens up… is there anyway of inserting an image on the left? Again it’d have to be pulled in from the xml file with the relevant text description.

Hope someone can help me with these, sorry if my explanations aren’t very precise, i’m new to actionscripting and xml so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Oliver.