My old homepage took (according to Frontpage's estimate) over two MINUTES to
load on a 28.8 modem! The new "flash screen" gets people into the site
almost instantly,

If the "welcome to the inn" is basically your old home page, there's
really nothing visible on the page that =should= take that long.
However, each thumbnail is 10K or so. That's 130K right there, and
the pics are small enough they don't have to be that big. You could
probably squeeze them to 2K apiece (I just did it to the tiny red
baron, it looked fine and I was working from an already processed
image, which makes it look worse). The FrontPage navigation bar on
the left uses 2K per button of derived images for a total of 40K, and
probably preloads even more. It adds up. The text isn't all that
much, but the HTML for the scripts and preloads is.

KISS and you can shrink the page to something that loads faster than
your present splash screen.

Jose
--
Freedom. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.