Hello Tobias,
You can definitely use the Macromedia Flash or similar softwares inside LabVIEW, that will help you in doing some work in the background and play the flash movie in the foreground. One basic example showing Flash inside of LabVIEW is
Labview with Macromedia FlashAlso, there is a another strong feature in LabVIEW that might be of help is creating DLL's that you can call in any other program to utilize some of the powerful functions of LabVIEW.
You can get more information about NI in reference to Academics at http://www.ni.com/academic/
I hope it helps,
Rajiv