Thanks cancerinform,

It's absolutely the Document class and I've never had to declare such variables before...
Here's what I've done: I just removed the graphics from the Flash IDE and created them dynamically and then used MovieClip(root).somemc to deal with any nested clips...
I'm a visual person and prefer using the Flash drawing tools to create/layout my graphical elements...Why the Document class isn't recognizing them I don't know, but frankly I think its ****e.

---Yvette