First off, your preloader will not display properly, at least at the beginning, because you're using a component, and some +/- 21KBs have to download on the first frame before you can see anything displayed.
One workaround is to create a preloader movie, which sole purpose in life is to load your present movie (without it's own preloader). The preloader will then display properly from the start, and when done, this preloader movie will actually be replaced by your present movie, by immediately re-loading it on level 0, thus replacing the preloader movie.
That's basically what I've done in my link above, only correcting the preloader display or not on a refresh.
As for skipping the animation, the only way would be to use the sharedObject as Bill suggested, assuming SOs weren't disabled. On the first frame of "interface" (with a stop(); action), you would then have to check if the SO already exists on the user's system (and if not create one!), then comparing the last login time (stored in the SO) with the present time, jump to frame 19 if the difference was more than 10 minutes. A lot of trouble to basically skip a 19 frames animation and at your frame rate of 17 fps which lasts but one second or so. Is it really worth it? I'd understand if the "intro animation" lasted a minute, but for skipping 1 second's worth of animation? Think it would take more time to check the damn thing than just playing it! But that's just my opinion! Regards,