Flash/Actionscript has had communication between Flash and the browser since Flash 3 (over 10 years ago). It started out as function calls like fscommand(), and is now a formal API in the form of ExternalInterface.

You had me at computer types making the kind of buggy crap and lost me at HATE flash and anything I can't name off the top of my head can go STRAIGHT to hell.

Do you hate flash and similar technologies that much? I guess that means you hate all the web video you get to watch for free daily? You must also hate google analytics and google street view? Do you hate that many sites allow you to embed their flash applications into your site?

The point is, Flash has it's place and can play nicely with HTML websites.

We had a similar experience with Flex 2/3. Flash would hold onto objects through invisible references that were almost impossible to track down and release. We even went so far as setting all object properties for all objects to null before unloaded, and still nothing. It got so bad at one point that each user click increased memory usage by 10mb without ever returning it. This problem occurred both with our own custom code and with the base components provided by Adobe/Flex. This leads me to believe that it wasn't not our code that was the problem, but a fundamental problem with the Flash runtime. Oh yeah, objects instantiated through MXML are even harder to track down and release.