Timeline scripting is a dirty business, and really, a carry-over compatibility layer for Actionscript 2 projects. Whenever possible, I highly recommend not doing it, and simply keeping all of your code in your document class. As you're experiencing, timeline code causes headaches.
Consider instead just creating both states of your Stage (it sounds like that's what your two buttons are jumping between) and simply hiding them offstage or setting their alpha to zero and their mouseEnabled state to false. Furthermore, if the purpose of your frames is to play animation (a tween), consider instead switching to a much more powerful suite such as TweenLite. Moving an object over a hundred pixels (smoothly) can be as easy as:
TweenLite.to(redBall, 3, {x:100});
Now, if you're manually adding these items to the stage, as long as the object is a dynamic one, you can assign an instance name to it which will be saved between frame loads. Be aware the object name is not the same as the instanced name. For example:
var redBall:Ball = new Ball();
redBall.name = "bubbles";
The object's name is Ball
, but it's represented as a variable called redBall
. Its actual DisplayList name will likely be ambiguous (such as "Instance71"), and I can manually define it as "bubbles"
. 3 different names for the same object, all very different and necessary.
Even if you give the object a displayList name, you may not be able to reference it through code unless you enable Automatically declare stage instances, which basically creates on each object a pointer to the displayList object.
That said, you can always fetch the object by other means. Obviously, your buttons are always appearing, but you're trying to find a very specific object on the stage. At this point, we can use getChildByName() or getChildAt().
Hope that helps. -Cheers