Students skipping hidden slides

Hi all,

I am facing a very peculiar little problem. I have created a course which has several topics and sub-topics. In general the course hierarchy is as follows:

Introduction to Excel (Level 1, Visible in left menu)

-- Excel Formulas (Level 2, Visible in left menu)

-- Excel Formulas (Level 2, Hidden)

-- Excel Formulas (Level 2, Hidden)

-- Excel Functions (Level 2, Visible in left menu)

-- Excel Functions (Level 2, Hidden)

-- Excel Functions (Level 2, Hidden)

Advanced Excel (Level 1, Visible in left menu)

-- Monte Carlo Simulations (Level 2, Visible in left menu)

-- Monte Carlo Simulations (Level 2, Hidden)

-- Monte Carlo Simulations (Level 2, Hidden)

-- Excel Solver (Level 2, Visible in left menu)

-- Excel Solver (Level 2, Hidden)

-- Excel Solver (Level 2, Hidden)

So in the left menu, I have:

Introduction to Excel

-- Excel Formulas

-- Excel Functions

Advanced Excel

-- Monte Carlo Simulations

-- Excel Solver

I am using the Articulate Blue 09 skinned that is packaged with Presenter. The issue is that a lot of students start with slide 1 in Excel Formulas and then do not realize that there are 2 other (hidden) slides in that topic. They complete slide 1 and directly move to Excel Functions from the left menu. The forward and backward buttons in the player are not very intuitive, unless we instruct the user to click on them in order to navigate through each and every slide.

FYI, we have disabled auto forward. User has to manually click the next button to proceed. 

As a work around, we have created a custom forward and back button (swf) and embedded it in each slide. We have removed the player level controls. This seemed to work until we hit a roadblock. We have swf videos in many of our slides and we are unable to insert the navigation button on slides containing a video. We tried to embed the buttons with the video files, but that didnt seem to resolve the issue as our videos are of different sizes (resolutions). 

Any suggestions on how we can tackle this issue? 

Thanks

Sid.