Movieclip is persistent on the stage

Good afternoon,

I have a quick (I hope) question. I have a movie clip that I place on my main timeline, not dynamically, but using the editor. So, I did not do stage.addChild or anything else to make it visible. All of the keyframes in that layer, preceding the movieclip, are blank.

I also have a button in the same frame as the movie clip, and when you click it, you are taken back a few frames BEFORE the movieclip was placed on the timeline. Unfortunately, the MC shows up in the frame you are taken too. And when you finally progress to the MC’s frame, there are now two copies of the MC, the one from the first go-round and now the new instance of the MC. I want to know, without doing stage.add/removeChild, how can I get rid of this persistent MC?

Thanks in advance!