Library asset duplication and actionscipt linkage issues

Hi All,

I'm pretty much a complete novice when it comes to Flash and have only been using it for about a week, so have very limited knowledge. Any advice you guys could give me on this would be greatly appreciated.

I work as an artist in the games industry and I've been put on a project which is an update for an existing released game. The original release was done by another developer so I have been passed all the assets/flash files to decipher all on my lonesome - a pretty daunting task for someone who has never touched flash before.

Basically there are a whole bunch of character animations which have fairly complex setups (movies within movies within movies etc etc) and a lot of assets are cross referenced between them (dizzy style stars spinning around the characters head for example).

My task is to create a whole bunch of new characters whilst keeping the animations the same as the original movieclips.

I started out by duplicating and renaming the library assets containing the assets, then one by one replacing each image with my new character parts.

Within flash this all seems to work fine but as soon as I publish I get reams and reams of linkage errors.

I notice that when I duplicated the character assets, all the other assets which are referenced in those movie clips are being duplicated too.

So...what I'd really like help with is the workflow for duplicating a folder of assets so only assets I am wanting to change get duplicated (keeping the references to the dizzy stars etc) and setting up linkages so I dont get conflicts.

Does anyone have any tips/links to tutorials or general advice on how to go about this?

Many thanks.