I've only encountered "magic" with memory in AVM2 a few times - primarily, where API allocations and object allocations interact. I usually blame myself for it,

I've only encountered "magic" with memory in AVM2 a few times - primarily, where API allocations and object allocations interact. I usually blame myself for it, but it's a problem rife throughout the Flash API that you'll try something and it won't work because you did it before Flash was "ready," so you have to go back and do some voodoo and defer things to run in just the right order to get it to work. These quirky behaviors are left undefined in the specs and docs. I also don't use the fancy features of AS3 - Dictionary and weak references - because I work from haXe and would rather write for portability most of the time. And I minimize my use of the event listeners and display list for the same reason. I think I've avoided a lot of grief because of that.