Removing the onRelease function of a movieClip

I'm not in the loop, but by the sound of it you'll have the onRelease event you're calling in the same level than the other mcs...

eg:
col1_mc.DUMM_mc.onRelease, rather than: col1_mc.onRelease

haven't followed the issue, just q quick guess...

Ahh, I remember reading that somewhere now. However the parent still seems to be masking the child clips. I'll try it again though, otherwise i'll have to pull them on to the same timeline.

Sorry I should have explained the file better. However I think you're last paragraph is right in this case, the parent clips onRelease is hiding all the child clips functionality.

I will have to place the child clips on the same movie. Just seems odd there is no workabout for it in Flash.

I really appreciate your help on this.

well, I'm kind of assuming you've got some sort of menu here. so while the menu is open, you need to tell the parent not to run the loadPlan function right?

I don't know the whole scope of your system, so I'm guessing here, but you will need to set up a variable that you can use to determine weather or not the function should be called. set up a boolean var in the clips timeline previous to the onRelease ...

var dothis:Boolean = true;

... then in the clips on handler set it opposite when trigger the first time ...

col1_mc.onRelease = function() {
if(dothis) {
_parent.loadPlan(this, this._parent);
dothis = false;
}
};

... now you'll have to decide 'when' you need to set it back to true again.

However, having said all of this, it still may not work. sometimes when 'buttons' (clips as buttons also) are placed within one another, the 'top' layer's on handler will be the only one active, and the other 'buttons' won't function being 'covered up' by the parent layer. If this is the case you may need to contrive a different system. Or even just change the handler to an onRollOver possibly, but I don't have enough info on the structure to say for sure.

i tried changing the name of the parent clip but that does not work either

yes I just tried that but it does as you say, it disables child clips.

What kind of conditional system would you think?

you can set the 'enabled' property of the clip to false:

col1_mc.onRelease = function() {
_parent.loadPlan(this, this._parent);
this.enabled = false;
};

although if you return to the clip at a different time or state you may need to set the property back to true.

it is also possible that this will disable other child clips, which may require you to develop a conditional system to disable the button clip.