For the intranet where I work, I had a requirement that, after you kick off a long running database job, the PHP application should take you to a page that would display a progress bar for how much of the job was done, and the idea was that you had to go back to that page every once in a while and check the job's progress. However, it is very difficult to find a working and easy solution without using Flash.
Well, I found a decent looking progress bar that is licensed under the Creative Commons license here:

http://www.webappers.com/progressBar/



Now the only thing I have to do is add auto-refresh in the meta tag or a little bit of AJAX to spare the user the "pain" of clicking the Refresh button.

i personally wouldve just used flash or director, although you dont want to, it would seem easier!

I agree with the OP decision NOT to use flash/director/some other 3rd party plugin to do this. While they may look pretty and all, loading a flash object/java applet/etc just to do a simple animation seems like alot of unnecessary overhead, aside from requiring a 3rd party plugin to complete a basic user function, which really, in my book, should be a web-design faux-pas.