I have a couple of old AS2 movies and some newer AS3 movies.

I have created a new AS3 'Menu' movie which loads the individual movies onto the timeline and they all appear to work fine, using the following method

HTML Code:
var i = new Loader(); 
i.load(new URLRequest("as2Movie.swf")); 
main.addChild(i);
on one frame and:

HTML Code:
var i2 = new Loader(); 
i2.load(new URLRequest("as3Movie.swf")); 
main.addChild(i2);
on the next.

And all works well and dandy. Except i had a timeout on the individual movies that kicked in when a button wasn't pressed and it returned to the first frame of the movie. Now i want it to return to the first frame of the parent menu movie. So for the AS3 movie when the timeout kicks in i use

MovieClip(parent.parent.root).gotoAndStop("start") ;

and that works fine, but i'm really struggling with the AS2 movies as they appear to sandbox or something which is stopping me interacting with the new main menu movie into which they are loaded. I just want to navigate to the 'start' frame in the main new menu movie but it just wont go. I have tried tracing every which way and it always comes back undefined ie:

trace(_level0);
trace(_level1 === root);
trace(root.parent);
trace(_root.parent);
trace(_root._parent);
trace(parent);
trace(_parent);
trace(_level1);

Results in

undefined
true
undefined
undefined
undefined
undefined
undefined
undefined

So every variation of gotoAndStop("start"); (_root, _level0, _parent etc) i have used just draws a blank

Anyone any ideas?