flash actionscript: I'm trying to place background music in my Flash movie.
I can do that easy enough, but commanding it to start and stop using buttons
and actionscript isn't working.
Does anyone have a suggestion that will help? Thanks.

You need to look into the "Sound" Object.

By creating an instance of a Sound object, you will have at your disposal play
and pause functionality, among others.
You'll need to create a MovieCLip that loads in a sound file, then create the
Sound Object pointing to the MC

another way that may be easier is just to create an seperate movie clip that is
on its own layer and load the sounds into that. that way when you want a sound
to play just give a button the action _root.mysound_mc.play(); or stop();
this is the simple way. but if you want more control then do what ufitzi said
to do.

also check out the flashkit site