Maybe this is something that has been posted before, or possibly many of you already do this but just in case…
I recently discovered that Fireworks does a much better job of compressing bitmaps while retaining quality than the Photoshop save for web feature, or ImageReady for that matter.
I am easily cutting the file size of my jpegs in half simply by exporting them from Fireworks. I know that when it comes to using bitmaps in Flash size really does matter 
Just though I was pass this on, if it is already common knowledge feel free to delete/ignore this entry.