Problems with transparent flash + choppy performance

Hi, I’m a complete flash newbie and I’m in desperate need of some help. Here’s the problem.

I’m making a web page with few flash animations and one of them is based on “Snow 3.0” tutorial found here on kirupa.com. I loaded the movie in transparent mode, and gave it a low z-index (1), so I’d have a soft, animated background. Above this movie I have two more fairly small flash movies on different locations (one in transparent mode - cause i want to be able to see the “snowflakes” through this one -, and one in normal mode - this one is for the top menu), and also a regular html text block, to which I added a transparent background in CSS.

Well, the page looks good on my machine (which is fairly fast), but when I tried it on a PIII 1000MHz notebook, the whole page became the symphony of choppiness! I experimented for a while and discovered that the “snowflakes” animation is the culprit. When I remove this, the page loads as fast as it should. I even discovered that when I put the this animation in “normal” mode, everything works fine as well - but naturally, it covers the contents of the page. The snow animation itself has 2KB, and its dimensions are 500x420.

If anyone has an idea on how to make this thing work I’d be forever indebted to you (okay, maybe for just a couple of days). But seriously, thanks for any comments and please be gentle, this is my first post :wink:

~Shtroodle