Flash Help Needed

I'm attempting to make an advanced slideshow for my site, which will read each of the 5 slides from an xml file.

So far, I've managed to make the slideshow work fine, with 5 buttons which change the current slide, together with the whole thing running on it's own. I've even managed to get each slide to be read from an xml file, but I've got a problem.

My problem is that the images are loaded to blank movieclips on the first frame, which works fine, but once the movie reaches the last frame (and the gotoAndPlay(1) actionscript), it flashes as it loads the images again.

To attempt to overcome this, I forced the movie to return to frame 2 (the frame after the xml load), and for some reason all of the images disappear as if they were forgotten about and not loaded in the first place.

Here's the code from frame 1:

slideshow = new XML();
slideshow.ignoreWhite = true;
slideshow.onLoad = function(success) 
	{
	slide1	
	loadMovie(this.firstChild.childNodes[0].attributes.image, "slide1");
	loadMovie(this.firstChild.childNodes[0].attributes.image, "slide1_base");
	loadMovie(this.firstChild.childNodes[1].attributes.image, "slide2");
	loadMovie(this.firstChild.childNodes[2].attributes.image, "slide3");
	loadMovie(this.firstChild.childNodes[3].attributes.image, "slide4");
	loadMovie(this.firstChild.childNodes[4].attributes.image, "slide5");
	};
slideshow.load("slideshow.xml");

Code (markup):

Does anyone know of a way of just loading this stuff once, and making the movie remember the images it has loaded, no matter what part of the movie I gotoAndPlay?

Please help!

 

you have the data after frame 1, I advise setting it up like this:

Frame 1:
Load your external variables. On success, goto frame 2

Frame 2:
Load your XML Data. On success goto frame 3

Frame 3:
Parse your XML data to multi-dimensional arrays and delete the XML data. On success goto Frame 4.

Frame 4:
Start your movie, show your backgrounds, and all that shnazz.

 

continued:

on frame 4, have a stop(); and never go back in frames. Control all your empty mc's and navigation, etc... from frame 4 and just stay there