Maybe I express myself somewhat unclear, but I did not mean that you do the parsing yourself, but I was talking about Flash's parsing algorithm. I just took a guess at how Flash might parse XML (as I have implemented a very simple XML parser once in C++). And from the documentation you get to know that "the XML data is not parsed until it is completely downloaded", so the load method also parses.
I haven't tested all examples yet on Flash MX, but I guess that must be somewhat faster, as MM claims to have optimized the XML parser.

Grimz