animated mask not showing up in swf

I have 2 animated masks. On the stage in the flash they work fine when I run the animation, but when I publish the movie, the second mask doesn't do anything!

when I the mask layer back into a regular layer it works fine when published and the movieclip animates fine. The movie clip does indeed run all the way through, it loops back and I put a trace half way through the broken mask's timeline. I have no actionscript anywhere on the timeline.

here is the fla, the problem is occuring in the movie clip '1'

www.raymondselzer.net/forrests.fla

Because the image above the second mask is hiding the image underneath.

if you move the 'branches' mask and layer above the 'trunk' layers, it still doesnt work. Also if you make 'branch mask' a normal layer and publish, you can see branch mask.

Can't you try using only one mask and one image and first opening the stem and afterwards the branches?

aha! that would be better, wouldnt it?

for ****'s sake! stupid flash, I moved it to 1 mask 2 images, but that wasnt the original problem. The original problem was that the mask was a movieclip, but because it was being tweened flash tracked it as a graphic by default, so it just wasnt doing anything. So I tracked it as a movie clip and it worked like a mask, BUT, it did something, what it unmasked seemed like what it should have unmasked had it been half its width to the left! WTF. So I took the movieclip out of the tween and just replaced it with the graphic from within the movieclip and now it works. What the ****! No sense!

that was a little convoluted so you can see for yourself in these swfs

http://petoria.thedrunkenclam.com/wtfflash/

4 swfs each a different combonation of tracking, notice the first two masks work, second two dont, and the second one looks retarded. The problem is obvious and so is the solution but the reason for the problem is baffling.