Replying to myself:
picked a cross-country colleague's brain and discovered some interesting stuff about pre-built buttons and the drop-down advanced action menu in Cp6:
- the pre-builts don't work as advertised on a consistent basis, especially when your projects start to get large. (which is exactly what I was up against here)
- creating buttons using smart shapes that rebuild each of the standard actions as custom advanced actions seems to overcome the erractic behavior for a large project.
So, basically, my method from here out will be to avoid using any labor saving shortcuts when creating an interactive and building those elements from scratch for each project