thanks again! that worked perfectly. exactly the way i wanted it. the only thing i had to change was my swfobject code to the new format. i was using the old one which was not letting me put things like:

so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess","samedomain");


etc...

thank you for all your help. the instructions were absolutely straight forward that came with the resources. now my lightbox appears on top of my movie when clicking a thumbnail to open the full image. looks great