Ming Sprite confusion

Please cc me on answers, as I'm way behind in this list... I have a perfectly good Ming (Flash) movie coming out of PHP, but it's a bit large... I'd like to put this thing on a diet. I figured I could do it with a Sprite for the tiny portion that's animated, but I'm not getting quite what I expect for output... Here's the way it should look: http://tourbaby.com/scheduleswf.htm 350K Here's the Sprite version: http://tourbaby.com/scheduleswf.htm?useSprite=1 80K Here's the source: http://tourbaby.com/scheduleswf.phps It seems to be skipping all the "nextframe" calls I make on the Sprite in the animation loop... What's up with that? Am I just being bone-headed about something? (Probably, but what?) The background "map" JPEG is only like 24K, but still I don't need to repeat that whole thing every frame... PS Any way to get the text back to blank so I don't create/destroy 50 text objects? PPS Any way to diagnose a bloated Ming movie and determine where all the space is going? PPPS Anything else I could do to put this thing on a diet? PPPPS Any pointers to OpenSource text-to-speech applications would be quite useful as well. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm I'm looking for a PRO QUALITY two-input sound card supported by Linux (any major distro). Need to record live events (mixed already) to stereo CD-quality. Soundcard Recommendations? Software to handle the recording? Don't need fancy mixer stuff. Zero (0) post-production time. Just raw PCM/WAV/AIFF 16+ bit, 44.1KHz, Stereo audio-to-disk.