ActionScript 3.0 :: Best Way To Repeatedly Load Random Commercials?

Here's my end goal: I want to display commercials on a screen at my wife's bakery. The script should load one commercial, play it, then unload it, randomly load another, and so on. I am completely new to as3 and have unsuccessfully been following several online tutorials. My first attempt had code in each commercial file (swf), that randomly called up another commercial, which in turn called up another file, and so on--but this became a memory hog and crashed the program after a few minutes.

Since then I have created one main swf file that loads an xml file, which holds all the information for the commercials. However, when the swf commercials are loaded according to the xml file, they don't play properly: when the first commercial finishes playing, the next one is already partially done. Obviously it started playing earlier. The swfs should unload and load the next according to a timer, with the length of the timer being different for each swf according to the xml data.

Even with this, the first swf didn't always stop when it should. My code is getting complicated and the display looks sloppy. Would it be better to convert the swf to flv and create an flv player that has 'continuous play' and 'shuffle' features? Would it be better to convert each swf into movieclips and put them all into one swf? (I like the manageability of using an external xml file; I will be adding and removing commercials frequently and want to keep this as simple as possible.)