LoadMovie (swf) scaling problem...

Question

I have a movieClip for loading external pictures or SWF files
that's works just fine - unless the loaded SWF has an object that
is located or moves off the stage (it's original stage - the one
the loaded SWF was published with). The movieClip rescales the SWF
to keep the object in view. For example, if a line of text starts
off-stage left and is tweened to off-stage right, the movieClip
will zoom in, then out, to keep it displayed.
While this may one day be a nifty effect to play with, it's
not what I intended.
I've tried using this in the loaded SWF:
Stage.scaleMode = "noScale";
and this in the loading movie:
myMovieClip._lockRoot = true;
Thinking this would prevent the loaded SWF from scaling (and
to make sure the loading movie didn't think I was telling *it* to
stop scaling...), but that didn't work. I tried to rework the
loaded SWF so that nothing actually left the stage, but the effect
doesn't work with text or bitmap images (they skew) and the
animation gets a bit jumpy. I'd like to avoid converting it to an
animated GIF or movie, since GIFs don't animate and I'm concerned
about file size (and I'd like to able to allow for SWFs that may do
things those simply can't do).
I'd also like to keep it a movieClip, since I want it to be
able to still accept images.
I'm pretty sure there's an easy answer to this - maybe I just
screwed up with my placement of the code above (in the loaded SWF,
it's the first line of actionscript to run; Scene 1, frame 1 -- in
the movieClip movie, it's the line right after the movieClip is
created with createEmptyMovieClip and right before the SWF is
passed to it).
So, is there a way to prevent a movieClip from resizing a
loaded SWF that contains elements off-stage?

Answer 1

Okay, first, let me say, I completely forgot to move the
loading movieClip's registration mark to the top-left corner; when
I did that, it stopped the wierd scaling when the objects were
off-stage top and left.
I then tried masking as you suggested, and it did work, sort
of - the area where the mask covered the right and bottom still
showed, at least the mask did (which surrounded, but was not on,
the stage). The result was a little version of the loaded SWF,
surrounded by a border right-and-bottom.
That's when I realized that flash ignores the stage
completely with loaded SWFs. Yeah, I know, I should have got that
when I had to replace the background color with a rectangle on a
bottom layer.
It then struck me exactly what I did wrong - the function
that resizes the SWF to match the loading movieClip's size was
still looping (all it did was check to make sure the loaded SWF was
completely downloaded, then size it), and when things went off
stage, they were taken into account everytime. I setup a flag that
indicates whether or not an image or SWF has been loaded and sized.
That fixed it.
That's what I get for writing actionscript at 3 in the
morning.
I'm not sure if this will still work for symbols that start
off-stage right or bottom (the registration mark prevents them from
showing left and top regardless of the resizing). A single starting
blank frame should fix that, though.
Thanks for your help - I was ready to give up and stick with
static images.