AS3 Swap depths in Flash IDE without destroying movieclips - actionscript-3

Question

I have two movieclips, one is on top, one is on bottom. The top one is set to the second frame. I move it to the z axis bottom on the next frame, and for the remaining frames it plays all frames like it has been reset without any code (like I didn't tell it gotoAndStop(2)).
Image example: http://i.imgur.com/mQ8f5uT.gif (hard to tell by the frame rate, but the dark green box starts playing as if I didn't set it's frame once I move it below)
I know it doesn't have that issue when I code the depth swapping with setChildIndex, but the animations are lost.
If you're wondering, it's a simplified issue of a larger moving character sprite animation that I would like to swap depths of movie clips in the animation without resetting the movie clips underneath the depth change. So I'm not really looking for a work around per se, unless there's a well design solution and not a band aid "hack."

Answer 1

I think I didn't understand your question fully. A MovieClip will keep playing or keep being stopped no matter what you do with it, even if it was removed from the scene. I made a simple example which shows that MovieClip state is not affected by depth change.
The working SWF is here to test: http://zdg.ru/tmp/updown.swf
And the code is:
import flash.events.MouseEvent;
var is_playing:Boolean = true;
btn_toggle.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, doToggle);
btn_updown.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, doUpdown);
function doToggle(evt:MouseEvent) {
if (is_playing) mv_test.stop(); else mv_test.play();
is_playing = !is_playing;
}
function doUpdown(evt:MouseEvent) {
var tmp:int = getChildIndex(mv_block);
setChildIndex(mv_block, getChildIndex(mv_test));
setChildIndex(mv_test, tmp);
}