I've been making an animated button using a MovieClip in Flash using ActionScript 3. The problem I had was making the hand cursor appear over it, firstly at all and then when my button had text in it.

To make a MovieClip behave like a button and use the hand cursor set the following properties for the MovieClip.

clip.buttonMode = true;
clip.useHandCursor = true;

Next, if your MovieClip contains a TextField set the following property for the TextField.

clip.labelText.mouseEnabled = false;

This means that the button underneath deals with the mouse, so the cursor will behave in the way that the button tells it to. In the example in this post, Button 1 has the mouseEnabled set to the default true value and Button 2 sets it to false.

I have an ActionScript Class file linked to the button that does all this to keep my main movie code clean.