lets say you an asp page which contains 2 arrays that have up to 20
images that rotate randomly to keep the home page fresh. you also have
2 separate embedded flash files and various graphics on the page. is
there anyway to create a preloader that will load this page with some
type of progress bar that will indicate graphically how much of the
page is done and then show the entire page at once? i am guessing
there is no way to do this.

You can do two things:
1. Enable content expiration for the images and flash directories and
set it to expire after X days (you can do it through the IIS Manager).
Doing that will narrow down the problem only for the first time the
user enters your site (see below a possible solution).
2. To solve the first time users you can create a progress bar using
client side scripting. Images (and probably flash as well) fire an
event when they are loaded. You can catch that event (onload) and
change the progress bar accordingly.

Please let me know if you need an example

i need an example. you know what i mean though.. i need the whole page
to preload even though it contains random images scripts, flash, and
text.
is this even possible?  the point of this is so they see something
while the rather large home page loads instead of just seeing nothing
for long periods of time

Try both of these sites.   They have example code on how to preload with status:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/preloadimage.htm

or

http://javascript.internet.com/page-details/preload-page.html