HELP! Buttons Inside of MC AS3 not working

sorry for the n00b question
I have wasted a day of google searches and tutorial searches trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.

this is what I need done

I want a Movie Clip to house 5 buttons that will link to frame labels on the main time line.
(this will be my main menu navigation)

I have created 5 separate buttons
then created a Movie Clip.
dragged each of the 5 buttons into the movie clip
gave instance names for all of them.
then I dragged the movie clip to my main timeline and gave that an instance name.

I then went into the Movie clip and attempted to use AS3 to get the button instances to navigate to the frame labels.

no go

when I test my movie it keeps looping through the whole main timeline no matter how many stop commands I put in the main timeline or in the Movie clip itself.

if I have no AS in the Movie clip then the movie tests with the Movie clip working (no
scrolling through the timeline and rollover works fine but I still can not command the CLICKs)

I am sure I am overlooking something simple
any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

as a post script I have tried so many AS variables I thought it best to not enter any here
and see if someone could help me from scratch instead of fixing an already confused problem.

THX