Flash CS3: Drop Shadow Filter dissapearing on art Bug +MovieExplorer rescue
Took me a bit to find this. We are importing several characters drawn in Illustrator, adding any Filter, while the filter appears fine on the timeline, it dissapears when published.
After some digging errant empty TextFields are getting inserted into the art with no name and no text, and removing them fixes the issue. Though getting to them can be tricky.
Open up Window>Movie Explorer, make sure the first button at the top with "A" is depressed but nothing else, and in the far right icon, press it and make sure symbol definitions is turned on. Then start looking for TextFields that look like "--A (empty)" in the display. Double click on it and insert a long string like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" as soon as you click off you should start seeing the text start poking out of the art. If you need help, look at the bottom path on the MovieExplorer "Scene 1-> Layer 1-> Frame 1->" what may be happening is the TextField isn't on the first frame so right-click 'go to location' won't actually get you to it.
I'm unsure what is causing them, it could be the designers just clicking the Text creation tool by accident, or an Illustrator to Flash import bug. I'm pretty sure it's a bug in Flash not to render the filters, but at present I'm too busy to dig deeper.