Topic: Actionscript questions

Hi i'm having some seemingly silly problems with the old actionbasedscripting

first off:
i have a movie clip [mc1] with a button in it, the button has another movie clip[mc2] in its rollover state and this clip has a text-region in which i have gievn an instance name bob, i made the text-region with teh text tool and then selected dynamic [thats the right way to do this right?]

so we have something like this:

stage -> mc1 -> button -> mc2 -> bob [the text region]

i want to be able to spec the text that goes in bob from an actionscript layer in mc1. So i can make lots of mc1's and have different text.

Also i'd like to be able to scale the graphic of the button but not change the scale of mc2 if possible, i tried mc1.button._xscale but it didn't seem to do anything, and of course mc1._xscale does the whole lot, not what i want ideally.

So thats problem one, also i'm finding that the lineStyle command just doesn't seem to do anythign at all. I'm drawing lines between various mc1's which are all on the main stage, i know that lineStyle is a movieclip class command but i don't know what movieclip to tag it onto, cos the lines are kind of on _root almost, well the targets and start points are.

Also is there any kind of neat way to have lots of copies of something in the library without having to go, item->duplicate ad nauseum?

Finally anyone got any neat ideas on how i could generate random-numbers once to make CV's for a curve-to command within an on_enterframe doodad. heh lines that keep wiggling around at the frame rate looks a bit horrible. I guess i could just spec them as variables and make them once out of the on_enter_frame thing but i can't quite see how its going to be neat.

Thanks for the helps guys, this project is coming along nicely now. I have the lines thing down and i've got a grand little engine for connecting the points up. I'll post it when its done.

Also its suprisingly easy to make an enjoyable central-force simulation, gravity yeah, good.