Make sound-off button state persist across multiple Captivate swfs?

Experts:

We are designing a set of e-learning courses that will use multiple Captivate 8 swfs, each housed on separate HTML pages. If a learner turns audio off in one swf, we'd like to make that selection persist automatically across all the swfs accessed in the current session. Since we're concerned to get this working on later browsers only, localStorage gives us what we need to save and re-read the ccCmdMute variable across Captivates.  And we can get the playbar Flash swf to read localStorage for the ccCmdMute value.

Here's what we haven't figured out: is there any way we can get the playbar swf to programatically update the "audio on" button, at start time, to reflect the "sound off" state? We've tried sending mouse click events to the pbcBtnAudioOn movie clip inside the playbar, directly calling onPBCBtnClick("audioOff");, and some other attempts I've lost track of.

Is what we are wanting to do possible at all? If so, are we thinking about in a sensible way?

Thanks in advance for your insights.