a few housecleaning items:

CFPDF worked like a charm. I was able to output our pdf like we had with the custom tag without  a problem. Very, very cool.

Flex is more and more fun for me. As it stands now, I've got an image preview/upload app that puts the images you have into a tile list 3x4.
The images all have a 'sort_order' property to them, and that gets updated in the db when you drag and drop the images around in the list.

I hope to get an example of this up in the next day or so. While it's not exactly reinventing the internet or anything, it was a HUGE amount of fun doing it.