mecanim move and root animation

I am using the Taichi Character Pack from the asset store. Great freebie by the way. The animations in it are pretty good too, but the walk animation is giving me trouble. I have an idle and the walk, I have a speed parameter in mecanim and a transition between the two if speed is greater than 0.1 or less than it goes back to idle. The problem is that I need it to transition fairly fast for a fighting game which almost works ok, the problem is that the root animation is making the transform jump to it's final position if I stop the animation too soon. I just want him to stop moving where he is and go back to idle smoothly. I have tried making transitions from the walk anim to the other ones (like punch and block) but it seems like it always wants to finish the animation before continuing. I have tried with atomic on and off. if I suddenly need to block or punch I don't want to keep walking for a half second or more before I get to it. Any ideas? thanks