I apologize for bumping my own post, but I will only do this once and then try elsewhere.

Any ideas as to what could be causing this delay in code execution? Commenting out the "filtermc = ..." line causes the code ABOVE it to function about 2 seconds faster. It is almost like AS2 is pre-loading the movieclip and THEN running the function. Is that possible?

I guess I could fix the problem by loading the movieclip somewhere else in my code, like when the root movie first loads, but I am at this point more curious as to WHY the code is executing like it is so I can avoid this behavior in the future.

Has anyone seen this kind of behavior? Am I writing bad code or is this a known/unknown bug in AS2?