Embedding Flash - Internet Explorer - Remove Placeholder Image at Start

I've got a pretty good landing page, and we're testing out a flash video on it.

On firefox, chrome, safari, opera, it loads fine.

However, on Internet Explorer, a very annoying "placeholder" image appears over the flash box for 2-3 seconds while the page loads. This does not happen on other browsers.

Here is the link: http://www.gosave.com/betterthan/mypoints12

Here is the image of our problem.



Here is the code I'm using:

<OBJECT CLASSID="CLSID27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"

CODEBASE="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" Width="456" Height="355">
<PARAM NAME="movie" VALUE="/flash/mypoints_player.swf?270004842">
<PARAM NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="#ffffff">
<PARAM NAME="allowfullscreen" VALUE="true">
<EMBED SRC="/flash/mypoints_player.swf?270004842" ALLOWFULLSCREEN="true" BGCOLOR="#ffffff"

WIDTH="456" HEIGHT="355" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>

On other websites in IE, like cnn.com, espn.com, youtube, etc, the page loads fine without displaying such an image.

My question: how do I fix this so the box does not display? This is extremely frustrating and just looks amateurish....

Thanks so much!