I gather that generally links from within a flash presentation do not normally help with page rank but is there any means by which these links can be made useful for ranking purposes?
Flash is in a sense a movie. Search spiders don't spider movies aka: flash. Any links within the flash will not be found. The only way for a search spider to see a link is outside of a flash on the page directly.
That's right, search engines can't spider flash movies but if you place your link within <noembed> and </noembed> tags, your links will be followed and indexed. ·
Probably he means a website that is using flash in it's design. IT okay to have links in your flash, as long as on the page there will be a normal html link as well! So when you use flash menu's, do all the important links in html at the bottom too