1 Correct answer
It was relevant as you were asking if vectors would act differently than bitmaps, and yes, they do, and there is the proof. That was the point of it. I was also simply trying to illustrate how to nest a shape inside a clip to fix the issue. I did not read that you assigned the listener to the outer most clip however. I still disagree with mouseChildren. Chances are your issue was elsewhere.
Happens to the best of us, especially on complex interfaces. Makes you want to start assigning trace state
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Replies
Ah, I never knew about currentTarget. That would make life a lot easier. Thank you very much!
Do you happen to know how it affects performance? I would think disabling mouseChildren would also reduce the number of tests Flash has to do during a click, and that event.target would process faster than event.currentTarget if currentTarget has to climb the heirarchy, but sometimes Flash optimizes the opposite of the way I would expect.
edit: I ran a test with two instances (a and b) of the same MovieClip (which has two children, a MovieClip containing a shape [c], and a dynamic TextField [d])
a.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick, false, 0, true);
b.mouseChildren = false;
//b.c.mouseEnabled = false;
//b.d.mouseEnabled = false;
b.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick2, false, 0, true);
function onClick(event:MouseEvent):void {
var time:int = getTimer();
for (var i:int = 0; i < 5000000; i++) {
var n:String = event.currentTarget.name;
}
trace(getTimer() - time);
}
function onClick2(event:MouseEvent):void {
var time:int = getTimer();
for (var i:int = 0; i < 5000000; i++) {
var n:String = event.target.name;
}
trace(getTimer() - time);
}
I found that the currentTarget test on a averaged 1000 milliseconds, and the target test on b averaged 980 milliseconds. If I uncommented the two mouseEnabled lines, b averaged 960 milliseconds. So if you ever need a 2-4% increase in speed while accessing a property of an event target several million times, there you go 
(or you could use a reference variable instead of calling event.target/event.currentTarget each time and save 300 milliseconds...)
If you're directly coding a new 3d openGL engine saving that performance might make sense but I wouldn't kill yourself with it 
. Todays systems will have little to no noticable difference outside epic scale interfaces and intense vector/3d processing.
As for a bit of time savings you can set the "useCapture" argument to true in addEventListener() to stop the event during the capture phase and stop the propagation of itself or all other events overall with either stopPropagation() or stopImmediatePropagation() respectively inside the listener function.
Try those in your tests and see if you can shed a higher number. An event and listener that only cared about the fastest click response would look something like this:
a.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, mouseDownHandler, true, 0, true);
b.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, mouseDownHandler2, false, 0, true);
function mouseDownHandler(e:MouseEvent):void
{
// only care about the mouse event, stop all other events and this event further
e.stopImmediatePropagation();
// your code
}
function mouseDownHandler(e:MouseEvent):void
{
// your code
}
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