Tinting an object at runtime without breaking tweens

hi everyone,
I’m currently quite stumped at something I think should be possible.
I have a complex object that is motion tweened, and I want to change its tint at runtime.
However, it seems whenever I try to set a tint (or to that matter even try to set anything in the transform object) it resets the entire matrix/transform data. So I am stuck with a scaleX/scaleY of 1, and a static object with the color I tinted to.

A demo of what I am trying to do is here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?nzsebpjzdbg

Any idea how and why this happens?

Thanks,
Ehud