Stop move clip instance but still allow child clips and buttons to work

I am developing an animated movie in flash and am running into a hurdle that I do not know how to solve.

I have a movie clip instance composed of a series of button moving along a path.  The desired operation is as follows:
- On rollOver, scrolling buttons stop travelling along path and _alpha is changed to 100
- Button that is rolled over changes to Over state, changing what is displayed
- If user moves to another visible button, it's state is changed to Over while the latter buttons state is returned to Up
- On rollOut, scrolling buttons movie clip plays, and _alpha is changed to 50

The buttons are animated in a movie clip named Scroller.  I have added the following Actions to Scroller:
on (rollOver) {
      _root.scroller.stop();
      _root.scroller._alpha = 100;
}
on (rollOut) {
      _root.scroller.play();
      _root.scroller._alpha = 50;
}

What happens:
On roll over, the clip's _alpha is changed to 100, and the clip stops playing, HOWEVER, by stopping the clip, it also seems to stop all the child button instances from playing as well, ie. changing from Up to Over state.

Or atleast that's what I thought at first.  When I removed the _root.scroller.stop() and _root.scroller.play() the clip no longer stops on rollover, but the buttons over state still does not work.

When I remove all Actions, the clip nolonger stops, nor alphas up, but suddenly I can achieve the overstate on the contained buttons (a half victory I guess, but useless since the user cannot read moving text).

Help please!