3 problems involving counters and alterable values

[Poprocks]

1) I'm having some trouble with alterable values and counters in my game. First off, I can't get counters with animations to work at all. In TGF1 back in the day, I used it all the time, setting a picture to represent different numbers in the counter, but now that doesn't work for me in MMF2 -- no matter what value I set the counter, the picture never changes.

Here are the more major problems in my game though (the #1 above isn't actually there -- I replaced the counter with a normal numerical one)

2) I've got 2 alterable values going -- 1 is for "weapon" which is the weapon in the arsenal, and the 2nd is "weaponSelected" which is the weapon selected at the time (choice between weapon and punch). I want Fire4 (enter) to cycle through these if applicable. I've read my code over about a million times and it looks like it *should* work, but it doesn't. I've probably missed something obvious here, but could someone be so kind as to take a look?

3) when I get my character to "shoot an object" (with fire2), the bullet is fired *after* the shooting animation and doesn't use the shooting animation's Action Point. No idea why.

Sorry about the long-winded post, any help appreciated!!