James Avery makes a point that Eric Gunnerson has a way of doing splash screens. Unfortunately he has overlooked to easiest way to do splash screens which is to use VB.NET and set the splash screen form using the Project properties window. It’s as simple as 1) Enable application framework 2) Set splash screen to the form you want to load.
Oh, as an aside, if you want to control the minimum time that the splash screen loads for all you need to do is trap the application load event (select “View Application Events” from the Application tab on the project properties page, then select the appropriate event (ie Startup) from the combobox) and set the My.Application.MinimumSplashScreenDisplayTime property to the number of milliseconds you want the screen to show for.