Linking Buttons inside Movieclips to frame labels?

Hi, I’ve been working on a new issue while giving a break on cracking the other one.

I have a movie clip acting as a button with rollover/rollout animation- we’ll call it menu_mc for simple reference.

I’m basically creating a rollover submenu. I’ve set it up a few different ways but the most user friendly has been hiding the submenu_mc (which has 4 linked buttons to root frame inside) by doing:

_root.sub5_mc._visible = false;

then inside the menu_mc with the rollover I have the submenu trigger set to show:

_root.sub5_mc._visible = true;

The links are working fine but the problem I am running into, is that the rollover state, once over the submenu_mc, does the rollout function and leaves the submenu_mc hanging there by itself- still functioning perfectly.
You can go back over the menu_mc and it will play out the rollover again.

On the other simple animated buttons (which do not have submenus) I have coded:

on(rollOver) {
_root.sub5_mc._visible = false;
}

…in order to turn off the submenu_mc. That would work fine assuming you would go directly from one button to another, which can not be banked on that at all.

So I’ve tried removing all the code and placing the submenu_mc inside the menu_mc. This caused the rollover/rollout to work great but disables the submenu_mc buttons.

So I tried removing the buttons from the submenu_mc and placed them right inside the menu_mc where I would want them to show. Again, buttons disabled.

I’ve been looking and trying different methods (changing the buttons to mc’s and linking them by _root.gotoAndPlay, etc.) to no avail.

I have read a few different posts saying it is possible and isn’t possible. Hit test, etc.

Is it possible? If so what am I missing?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Working with Flash 8 & CS4, actionscript 2.0