Can someone help me make a pop up text box like the ones used at the Macromedia
Flash Exchange web site. The pop ups I'm talking about are the ones that pop up
when you go over the help icon, or the view comment. The comments pop up in a
small box with an arrow pointing at the hotspot. I wonder if these are done in
actionscript or if they are components. Thanks.

Those are probably the tooltip component from the Flash UI components set 3. You could also create the same effect turning on and off the visibility of a MC in actionscript.