Recently I needed to disable all buttons on my flash site. I trawled the net looking for answers but all I got was what I already knew. Which is disabling each button 1 by 1 using an array like so:

 
//an array of button instance names
var buttonInstanceNames:Array = new Array("button1","button2",
"button3", "button4");
 
//function that sets the buttons enabled state
function enableButtons(e){
   for(var i=0;i<buttons.length;i++){>
      this[buttonInstanceNames[i]].enabled = e;
   }
}
 
//call function and assign enabled state
enableButtons(false);

This is all good if you have a few buttons but what if your site is complex like the 1 I was working on and you wanted to disable all button interactivity without knowing buttons instance names.

Solution
Basically place a movie clip button over the entire movie or just over the area where your buttons are with _alpha set to 0. Remember to set the movie clip with a onRollOver, or onRelease event. Just set the blocking movie clip's _visible state to false when you want interactivity back.

Here is the code I used to get this working.

 
//The instance name of my blocker movieclip is "mcBlocker"
//show or hide the button blocker
function enableButtons(e){
   mcBlocker._visible = e;
   mcBlocker.onRollOver = doNothing;
 }
 
//do nothing when the blocker active
function doNothing(){}
 
//just enable or disable the blocker
enableButtons(false);
 

Hope this helps..