ShapeBase.pauseThread() problem

I have an aiplayer on which I'm playing animations, I also want to pause those animations. The problem I'm having is when I call pauseThread() on my aiplayer it stops the animation instead of pausing it and returns the animation to the first frame. When I call playThread() again it just restarts from the beginning.

Is anyone else successfully using pauseThread() or have any ideas on how to fix this?

Here's my code to start the animation

npc1.playThread( 1, "death3");

And to attempt to pause the animation

npc1.pauseThread( 1);

I've also noticed that changing the playback speed also restarts the animation from the first frame, I'd like to be able to alter the animation speed without restarting the animation.