Reading through Bendan's "How to make a single application morph", it describes how to change the bootsplash image by replacing the 'bootsplash-1024x768.jpg' and 'silent-1024x768.jpg' files in '/base/minitroot/bootsplash/images'. I'm assuming one is for the image and the other is for the progress bar.

If that's the case, we can scratch item 1 from the list

-Bob