Text Area Gotcha

I hoping someone with Flash CS3 can take the time to try and recreate this to see if this is really what I ran into or if I had some other problem going on.

Here’s what I did to run into the problem:
Made a new flash file and created a Text Area with the instance name “debug”
On the properties of debug, put in the default text “default text”

Made and linked a document class named documentClass with the constructor method containing the following code:
debug.appendText("
Test debug message
");

Built the project–it didn’t work.
deleted the default text from the Text Area
Built the project–it worked!

My class couldn’t edit the Text Area when the text parameter contained data.

Can someone please confirm if I’m crazy or if I ran into a gotcha.
Thanks!