How long does your show take to start?  It should only be blank for a brief
moment, unless you have a very large first slide.  Try Adding a new slide in
position 1 that simply has the text "Any moment now ..." and auto advances
after .5 second.  Your slide show should start fairly quickly.
Are you loading your show over a network or from a CD?  These have much
slower access times and will open much slower than a PPT file being loaded
from your hard drive.  Have you optimized your presentation for size?
Just for fun, I created a presentation on my local hard drive with 195
pictures on a single slide taking some 28 megs.  It took 15 seconds to start
the show (black screen), if this was the first slide.  If I placed a simple
slide (small, text only), it took less than a quarter second to start, and
then took the 15 seconds to load the monster slide and advance.
--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
http://billdilworth.mvps.org
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
vestprog2@     Please read the PowerPoint FAQ pages.
yahoo.             They answer most of our questions.
com                 
www.pptfaq.com
..