Well, it took me a long time of random searching but I did finally answer my questions. For the record, here's what I found.
1. This happened because my top/left marker was a bit off (you can see the star icon in the top/left of the scale9 image). It was creating some false negative left margin on the skin. 2. This happens because scale9 in flash does not apply to any bitmaps embedded (even if they are inside a movieclip!). This is a huge problem, and dissapointing to say the least. 3. Nope, stretching was occuring because I was using bitmaps, not native flash illustration tools.
