Problem Stopping Movie Clips

I have a movie in which I load multiple movieclips. The movie clips play in a continuous loop.

I am trying to stop the movie clips and am having a problem. Since I do not know how many clips I have loaded I need to close them in a loop similar to this:

for(x=0; x<=../:TotalClips; x++) {
eval("clip"+x).stop();
}

The problem is that only the first movie gets stopped. In debug mode after executing the eval statement once, the code takes off again even though I was stepping though it.

Find note, If I were to write the code as
eval("clip" + 0).stop();
eval("clip" + 1).stop();

it will work.

Any ideas? I have only been using flash for a couple of days now (MX version) so I might be missing something obvious

Thank you in advance

/:varName is deprecated. Instead use _root.mcA.mcB.varName (ie. the full path from the root)

var x = _root.mcA.mcB.varName;

for(var i = 0; i < x; i++){

_root["clip"+i].stop();

}