I got it working.. as a side not, since I have been working on this all day and the solution made me feel like an idiot.. In the AS when you are setting the text. You need to be sure you pass the nodeValue... I was doing this:

myTxt.txt = xmlNode.firstChild


That was wrong.. It was rendering the text, but it would not do the link... then I did this:

myTxt = xmlNode.firstChild.nodeValue

and that did the trick.