a newer then newbie flash question!

when you export your flash movie does it only use the frames you used?

OK, say i stop at frame 100 when you play it in flash it goes past fram 100 and shows a blank work area, so do i have to stop the animation or does it do it automaticly?

Sorry if this is a lame question I never produced anything in flash before.

It only exports any used frames.

Add a Stop Action to the last frame, or else it will (should) loop back to the beginning (1st) frame, unless the loop property is turned off in the publish options.

ok thanks.... also is it possible to loop only one layer in a scene while having others stopped?
ok, i'm just making my heard in flash, and i want the nav to stop after it fades in while the rest of the header has some random vector animation kind of like www.highersourcemusic.com

Well, there's a couple of ways you could do it. You could use movie clips, or else just do like your nav in say frames 1-50 (just example numbers) on Layer 1, then put all the random animation from frames 51 through whatever on Layer 2. Then on the last frame of your random animation, add an action to go to and play 51.

The answer is no. You cannot make one layer of your MC loop and the other layers stop. And what Moby said is right, and the best bet is to perhaps load in external MC's into your movie using the loadMovie command and then having the timeline in the external MC loop. You really should read up on this. Buy a Flash Book, all of them are pretty good, get one with some Actionscript in it, not all graphics, not all actionscript.