Need to stop instance of mc onEnterFrame

Question

(running CS3 and doing this in AS2)
i have a looping animation of a ball rotating, that i need to stop rotating once it reaches a particular frame (we'll say frame 60).
i tried putting:
ball_mc.onEnterFrame = function() {
    ball_mc.stop();
(ball_mc is the instance name of a particular movie clip.  i do not want to reference the actual mc as i have about 10 instances of it on the timeline)
everything is taking place on the main stage at the root level, but i can't seem to get the animation to stop.
any help would be greatly appreciated.
j

Answer 1

Oh. So many things aren't making sense here.
First what does this mean "...i do not want to reference the actual mc as i have about 10 instances of it on the timeline..."?
The only way to tell a movieclip to stop is to tell it to stop, so you will have to reference it. There are many ways to do such a thing, but without knowing exactly what you are trying to accomplish (with the whole project) it is hard to give exact advice.
The next thing is that I don't think onEnterFrame is what you are thinking it is. It means to repeat the code at the frame rate, it doesn't mean, "Do this when this frame is reached." If you just want to do something when you reach a frame you put a keyframe and add code like:
ball.stop();
All code on that frame will execute before the screen is redrawn. So I think that is what you are after.
Finally, there are a couple of reasons that the code above might not stop a given movieclip.
The first and most common reason would be that you have a scope problem. That that ball isn't a child of the current timeline. So if ball was actually inside another movie clip you might need to do something like
theOrbs.ball.stop();
Or perhaps you have mistyped or misnamed the instance. So if the instance name is Ball and you say ball.stop() it won't work because capitazliation and spelling matter.
Another popular way that stop() wouldn't work is if the animation of the clip is being done by code. stop() only stops the playhead on the specified timeline. So if there is some code making the ball move stopping its timeline won't stop the code.
And a similar issue to the scope and code issue is that if the animation that makes the ball move is actually provided by a movieclip nested inside of ball then ball.stop() will stop the ball's timeline, but not the independent timelines of its children.
So we need to know more about how you have designed your project.