looking for a free or low cost program to randomly display text and/or images

Three practical ways to add a "word/quote/image of the day" for the use-cases described by @jilly (movies, food, etc.): (1) random on every page load, (2) deterministic daily (the same item for everyone during a given day), or (3) server-side rotation where a cron job picks and stores a single "current" item once per day. @PoA's pointer to standalone PHP quote scripts is useful for (1); @GaryKing's suggestion to look for vBulletin-specific mods is the safest route if template edits must be avoided.

A compact, reliable method for a true "item of the day" is a date-seeded selection from a flat file or DB. The example below assumes an items.txt where each line is either a text-only item or "text|image_path". It produces the same selection for everyone on the same date and avoids hitting the DB each page view.

<?php
// deterministic "item of the day" from items.txt (each line: text OR text|image.jpg)
date_default_timezone_set('UTC'); // adjust to the forum timezone if needed
$items = array_values(array_filter(array_map('trim', file('items.txt'))));
if (!$items) return;
$seed = intval(sprintf('%u', crc32(date('Y-m-d'))));
$index = $seed % count($items);
$line = $items[$index];
list($text, $img) = array_pad(explode('|', $line, 2), 2, '');
$text = htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo '<div class="rotator">';
if ($img) echo '<img src="'.htmlspecialchars($img, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8').'" alt="'.$text.'">';
echo '<div>'.$text.'</div>';
echo '</div>';
?>

Integration notes and common pitfalls: include the script from a header/custom block or use a vBulletin mod if raw PHP is not allowed in templates; for DB-backed sets, avoid ORDER BY RAND() on large tables and prefer id-based selection or a precomputed daily index. Check server timezone (midnight shifts), file permissions, correct absolute/relative image paths, HTML escaping to prevent XSS, and any caching layer (board cache/CDN) that might prevent daily changes. Also verify rights to reuse quotes/images if content is not original.