Here is my super opinionated view on your question...
For what you wanna do it may be a better choice to go for Macromedia Director. It's original purpose was for creating CD-Roms, Presentations, Kiosks, etc. However I rarely use director because: It is $700 more expensive than Flash (Yeah, they sell it too...), it's got a steeper learning curve than Flash, even though "the experts" love it's interface, it's quite cumbersome unless you have three monitors, and finally most of the projects you produce with it will never look as good as a piece done in Flash. That's all opinion (except for the price)
As for producing cd-roms this is the problem i ran into: if your target audience is only PC...you can get your material together and burn it yourself or take it to some vendor with little trouble. but if you want it to be both pc and mac compatible than burning yourself could be a pain (burning yourself could be a pain, hahaha), and even some vendors don't have the right stuff for making discs mac-compatible...for home solutions, you gotta produce two versions of your .dcr or .exe file (just a config change, no biggy), you need to create an AUTORUN file (i saw a tutorial for this somewhere on the net (macromedia.com or webmonkey.com???), then you need burning software that can burn in a way that macs can "see"...which i never got around too (EZCD and Nero fail this i think)
Don't know if that helps ya...rob
btw: should this forum be renamed to "Shockwave"? because i easily have more Director questions than Flash...