I have create a project in which I define text content as strings stored in
variables defined on the root (rather than importing from any external source
which is waht I would normally do). It's suitable for this project to keep
everything contained within the swf. The problem I have run into is that I have
links in my text which, when dynamically placed into html enabled text fields
should show up as links. I have tried a lot of different ways to write the
string, using asci for the html markup elements, or concatenating in various
ways. Nothing works so far. Any ideas?

Since you haven't given us any code it is hard to tell what is wrong. This works.

myVar = "This is <a href='http://www.saffronthread.com'>a link.</a>";