Thanks for the reply, you're right that's exactly what the problem was. I figured out that when the balls travel too slow they tend to stick to the paddle, anything over 10pixels per frame seems to work fine.

But I've run into a new problem... All the buttons in my movie are sending the game back to Scene 1, you can imagine why that's frustrating. I refer to _root.gotoAndPlay([say 11 for example]) and instead of sending it to frame 11 on the current scene, it reverts back to scene 1, and I'm pretty sure it's continuing from scene 1's frame 11 instead.