swapDepths oddity

[Werner Sharp]

I ran into a problem with the swapDepths command that I was hoping someone 

had a workaround for.   I have a drop-down menu movie clip on it's own 

layer that I move to a high z-order to keep on top of the rest of my 

layers.  What seems to be happening though is the movie clip is actually 

getting duplicated, not moved.   Here's a sample FLA for the problem....


http://personal.rdu.bellsouth.net/rdu/s/h/sharpw/simple.fla


If you rollover the green squares inside the larger blue square, they 

change the current frame of the movie clip.   Pressing the gotoAndStop 

button will put the MC back to frame 1, just as expected.   But when you 

press the swapDepths button, which does a "menuMC.swapDepths(1000)", it 

seems to duplicate the movie clip.  The gotoAndStop button no longer works 

and there's two overlapping blue square movie clips.


Are there restrictions on calling swapDepths with a high layer number?  Or 

a layer that doesn't exist already?   I've seen this technique used a lot 

to fake z-ordering and 3D so I know it works in some cases.  Maybe only 

with MC's created with duplicateMovieClip or attachMovie?


I worked around my problem by just duplicating my MC from an offscreen MC, 

but still would like to know what was going on.


Thanks for any info.


Werner Sharp

sharpwbellsouth [dot] net