I want to have a splash screen come up at the start of my program. Normal sort of thing, shows a nice picture while the rest of the app loads. The image is a quite large (100kb) jpg.

Should I start a new thread when the app loads and open the form from there?

The form should disappear after 2-3 seconds or so.

What is the best way to do this, bearing in mind that I don't want to embed the image in the exe?