Thanks. I'm working on doing that. I can't really post the code that's failing, it's part of an application that's far too big to post, but have built a smaller example and can't seem to get it to fail.
I had been setting the selectedChild/index manually and took that out but it still fails. The code only manipulates the tab contents via mx:state settings. So, it's frustrating in that I don't really do anything to manipulate tab contents (which would have potential to be my bug).