Multiple Pre-loaders

I have two questions about “pre-loaders”.

Q1: I’ve tried looking around the forms for examples of a Main flash file playing while other components are loading in the background. Does anyone have sites that show examples to my above question or links to previous discussions on U.S. that I might have over looked?

Q2: If you look at http://www.plotdev.com/splash.html and enter the site there is a hand that counts down and it matches up perfect with the pre-loader (and it loads sound, images, etc above the main pre-loader). How does one do this?