I will eventually post this as a standard Drupl.org project - but since they are taking a while to set up my CVS account, I thought I would post here.
This is a custom module designed by www.LiquidCMS.ca. Until I have a project page setup on drupal.org - please see this link (www.LiquidCMS.ca/showcase1) for more info, demo and ZIP file.
The module allows a slide show presentation of teasers from a set of categorized nodes into a specified block. The module uses AJAX to return these teasers from the database.
The admin->settings for this module allow the site adminstrator to set the following parameters:
Block ID: the ID of the block that you want the showcase to display in (defaults to "showcase"
Category: the category of nodes to use for showcase (defaults to "showcase")
Delay: the time delay between slieds in the showcase
Start Delay: the delay before the showcase starts to run
Control Enable: whether to enable the showcase control panel
Top: the top absolute coordinate of the control panel
Left: the left absolute coordinate of the control panel
Although typically Drupal designers think of blocks as going in the left/right borders - a block may be located anywhere. For example the "liquid" theme used for the LiquidCMS site has a block with ID = "block-block-showcase" in the page header (in page.tpl.php).
Hope this is of use to people,
Peter Lindstrom