Help with linking external class

Hey guys,
Not exactly sure how to phrase this question - I’ve been having trouble searching for answers for hours. This is for AS 2.0. Basically the situation is that I’ve created a MovieClip in flash graphically (dragging textfields and labels into the gui and then using convert to symbol -> movie clip).

The idea is that I would then link this clip to an external class which would contain code for interacting with this clip.

After linking the class successfully, I went to writing the code. Now I’m trying to compile and I’m getting all sorts of errors, for example on a textfield in the clip, tx_Agree, I try to do

tx_Agree.htmlText = percentage + “% Agree”;

and the compiler complains

There is no property with the name ‘tx_Agree’.

In flash, the instance name for this text field is definitely set to tx_Agree. The same goes for all the other components in this clip - I have given each an instance name, but none are accessible from the external class which I have linked to the clip. Help please!