[mx]Making variables available in streamed movies

Sorry for the vague title, but I couldn’t think of another way of putting this in a shortened format!!

Scenario:
I am loading various movies into a "shell"movie as and when they are needed using loadMovie… No problems there.

However I have one movie which I am loading in to the shell “holder” movie which is supposed to load in variables from a php file. Now when this swf file is run in the browser outside of the shell, it loads in all the variables just fine. The loadVariablesNum command loads into “0” the root timeline, but when I run the shell and navigate to the swf file, none of the variables appear.

I am guessing I need to load the variables into ‘this’ movie, but I have tried that by using the complete path…
_root.holder_mc.loadVariablesNum(“scorevars.php”,“post”);

But this doens’t pick up the vars.
My problem is I am not fully understanding the relationship between swf’s loaded into each other and how the timelines interact… Anyone shed some light on this?

Cheers