I would like to create an engine that just displays static and animated image
files (.swf's, .gif's, and .jpg's) within Flash, drawing these image objects
from an xml file. The xml file needs to be generated by Coldfusion. Can anyone
point me in the right direction? I am not sure where to start.

thanks very much in advance!!:music;

Where are the items coming from? Database? Directory? List?

You can generate a new XML document with CF tags or cfscript functions, look
up cfxml and xmlnew().

There is a ready made flash gallery for images, slideshowpro. google it. It is
XML based and very easy to use.

Your XML file could look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding= "UTF-8" ?>
<gallery>
<image>
<imageName>image name</imageName>
<imageSource>path</imageSource>
</image>
<image>
<imageName>image name</imageName>
<imageSource>path</imageSource>
</image>
....
<!--- more image tags here --->

</gallery>

You can dynamically generate nodes in an XML doc with CF by looping over a
recordset or list and outputting the image tags in the doc.