ActionScript 1/2 :: Accessing Components Nested Inside A Movie Clip Instantiated At Runtime

I am having this problem with actionscript 2:

I have a class that instantiates a movieclip from the library, eg: myBar:MovieClip = level0.AttachMovie("debugbar", "debugbar_mc", 999);
 
myBar is an instance variable in the class.

Now the important part - debugbar in the library is a movieclip that contains some components - buttons and textInputs. The problem comes when trying to access these components.

I would have thought that this would work: myBar.input_txt.text = "hello";

in order to set the text of "input_txt", the instance name of a TextInput component on the timeline of the movie clip (frame 1 of a 1 frame mc).

This does not work. Infact, I cannot access any specific "component" properties - they come back undefined. I cannot added event handlers for the component events either.

I can however set and retrieve MovieClip properties for the "input_txt", such as _x. However there is one added strange thing with this too - setting _visible to false doesn't seem to work (however perhaps a component by default overrides this).

I tried casting it to a component, such as:
var temp:TextInput = TextInput(myBar.input_txt);
trace(temp);
 
which gave "temp" as null. Without casting, it gives the path to correctly.

It almost seems like the components are somehow broken when trying to access them this way - or that they cannot be accessed this way?

The thing is, I was able to access all of this before, when the code to do it was placed on the timeline (frame 1, the only frame) of the debugbar itself, where the components were placed at authortime.

I need to have it in a class though, as I need to pass in certain objects that need to be accessed by the mc. I am rather baffled as to why all this doesn't work.