Outstanding I found a post here in these forums that sent me to another site that gave me just what i needed. I had to do a bit of reorganising.

I deleted the content_mc and the 4 movie clips inside it and made another layer under the background layer and then just added text boxes and labeled them. Then I added an actions layer and used the following to get all the buttons working:

stop ();

Home_btn.onRelease = function() {
gotoAndStop("HomePanel")
}

AboutUs_btn.onRelease = function() {
gotoAndStop("AboutUsPanel")
}

Events_btn.onRelease = function() {
gotoAndStop("EventsPanel")
}

JoinUs_btn.onRelease = function() {
gotoAndStop("JoinUsPanel")
}
That did the trick and it now works but I have one other issue. When I press Ctl+Enter to test the movie i get the following error output, but if I close the error window everything works fine including the buttons? whats causing this error and is it something I need to worry about?

**Error** Scene=Scene 1, layer=Buttons, frame=1:Line 1: Statement must appear within on handler
onRelease = function (){

**Error** Scene=Scene 1, layer=Buttons, frame=1:Line 1: Statement must appear within on handler
onRelease = function (){

**Error** Scene=Scene 1, layer=Buttons, frame=1:Line 1: Statement must appear within on handler
onRelease = function (){

Total ActionScript Errors: 4 Reported Errors: 4