I can't get snap to work

Question

I'm doing the "Flash CS4 Professional Digital Classroom" book
and I'm to the chapter on symbols where they discuss snapping. I
think I've followed all the directions scrupulously - I've repeated
it about four times. I've turned on and off the "View/Snapping/Snap
To Grid" and whether it's on or off, I'm not getting the dragged on
symbol to snap. I can easily position it a few pixels away from the
grid in both X and Y directions. Is there some "uber snap" option
that says never snap regardless? This probably looks like one of
those "too stupid to answer" questions, but everything seems to
suggest that the only thing required for snapping to work is to
turn on the "Snap To Grid" option in the view menu, but it just
isn't having any effect for me at all whether it's on or off so I'm
stymied. I'm sure it's something stupid on my part so I apologize
in advance for whatever boneheaded blunder I'm making.
Darrell

Answer 1

Ah - well, it isn't exactly the problem you mentioned but
your reply has helped quite a bit though I'm still puzzled.
It doesn't snap at all when I first drag a symbol onto the
screen. I had been dragging onto the screen, observing no snapping,
deleting the symbol and try again so I never saw the snapping.
In order to get snapping, I have to drop the symbol and pick
it back up again. At that point, it uses the nearest "registration
point possibility" commences to snap that point. By "possible
registration point" I mean one of the nine points you can select as
the registration point. So if I grab near the center, it will use
the center as the point to snap to. If I grab nearest the top left,
it will use the extreme top left of the bounding box as the point
to snap.
So it appears that snapping works, just not very closely to
how I expected it to work. I thought that you picked the
registration point when you created the symbol and it always
snapped to that point. I also thought it would snap when you first
drag onto the stage rather than having to make a two step process
to get it to snap. So if the registration point isn't being used as
I describe, what is it being used for? Is it only to give a
reference point to describe the "location" of the object in
ActionScript? Like I say, the mystery is largely cleared, but I'm
still a bit confused.
Thanks for your help!
Darrell