thanks for the response, lee...

i could try to shrink the movie a bit more, but in all of the tests i've run off my pc, that doesnt seem to help much.

as far as image quality goes, its already only a 17 kb image, compressed via flash to 50%. i could also reduce that more, but... even when i replaced it with just a simple, vector-based gradient, i got the same cpu maxing effect.