Here is the 100% solution, called Diffusion sever: http://demo.pushtechnology.com/docs/manual/apis/flash/index.html
This is another option for you written by people at Microsoft:
http://laharsub.codeplex.com/
We use it and so far so good. Very fast.
No, the server cannot push data to the client without postback. It's the client application that needs to fetch it from the server. In fact there's the WebSocket API draft in HTML5 that allows the server to push data to the client but it still has limited browser support and you will need a server that is capable of handling this protocol.
So currently the only reliable way of doing this is by having the client poll the server for data.
Flash has support for socket communication, that can be used to push data to the client without polling.
You mention asp.net, I'm no expert in that area, but maybe the "Active Server Pages" aspect doesn't fit so well with socket communication, but I'm pretty sure you can build the server side of a chat, pushing data via sockets, in .Net.
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