Tooltips in Animate ActionScript

Hi everyone, 

I wonder if someone can help me as I'm at my wit's end here.  I'm trying to create tooltip popups over icons for a particular part of my website, and everything I've tried has one flaw or another.  All I want is for a mouse to scroll over these icons and a popup appear with a description, that disappears again once your mouse moves away, or onto the next icon.  No doubt I'll get a lot of recommendations for using button MouseOvers for this, and I've tried that, the problem with that is that the popup tooltip ends up forming part of the button and increasing it's size, therefore interfering with other buttons.  What I really need is for the popup text to NOT be considered part of the button, but only appears during a mouse over event.

I'm attaching an image for reference on what I've tried.  As I'm sure you've guessed, a user can't even move to the next icon as the current method of tooltip popup ends up obscuring the other buttons.

I've also tried placing the "tooltip" elsewhere on the screen, away from the icons, but in doing so the invisible size of the button then extends far out to whereever the text ends up being, creating rollover events in places I don't want them to be.  

Any help someone could give would be massively appreciated.