Does anyone know if a there is such a thing as a electronic preheat ballast that uses a standard starter?
I would guess not, but may be there is.
You never know.
I had to ask.

I asked that same question 10 months ago here, and I never got an answer. The thread just ended up being three people lecturing each other about programmed start.

I know this though - electronic ballasts for 2-pin PL lamps (which have a built-in starter) do exist. Also, a member here made an extremely cool electronic preheat ballast, complete with glow starter, that ran on low voltage DC and powered a 1.5 watt night light lamp. I would link a picture here, but I can't find it!

Also, I found on YouTube a home-made electronic preheat fixture that someone made by modifying an instant-start ballast. I was skeptical about it's legitimacy, though, and we discussed it here.

So in short, the concept is completely and perfectly possible, and has been marketed for PL lamps. As for ballasts for other lamps, though, I've never seen one. Those PL ballasts could very well be harvested and used to run T5 lamps, though.

The electronic ballasts for the PL lamps were not as much preheat in the way, how they operate. The main reason is the way lower inductance (3 decades), which can not generate the inductive kick with the starter switching transition speed.

These ballasts operate in about the same way as the most common lower power CFL ballasts: The inverter drives the series LC, where the L is in the ballast box and the C is the capacitor parallel to the starter inside the lamp. The consequent higher current heat up the filaments and voltage ignites the lamp. Usually all this happen way before the starter glowbottle contact closes at the first time, so in fact the starter is not used for the starting at all. Nevertheless it's role is not that unimportant: When the lamp electrodes loose all their emitter, the lamp usually refuses to start normally and start to overstress the ballast. But the globottle closes after not as long time (so the ballast survives) and bypasses the capacitor, so eliminates the high voltage and current condition of the circuit in resonance. That mean the electrodes are continually heated, until they blow and shut the oscillator down and at the same time the inverter is not overloaded.

But there is one significant problem with these ballasts:
With the lamps being intended for real preheat choke ballast, the standards govern just the lamp and the glowbottle parameters, but not the capacitor there. And it happen, than some makers omit this capacitor at all, still that lamp conform to the standard.
But with the electronic ballast, the essential component is that capacitor. When it is missing and/or had different capacitance than the ballast count for, the system does not work. So on given ballast, only some lamps do work, not all.
So one ballast will operate just the Philips PLS-11 lamp and only from some limited era (as even single maker may change the capacitor value over time, if it is not subject to standard spec), another ballast would be needed for Osram equivalent, another for SLI and so on.
So for these ballasts to be really usable, the capacitor value would have to be included into the specifications of the standard governing these lamps. But for that an agreement would be necessary between major lamp makers and the standardization body, but that never happened.
So because there was no interoperability among different lamp and ballast makers guaranteed, the concept have simply died.

So designing an electronic for most of lamps with an integrated starter would be technically possible, but it was just the lack of standardization, what killed the concept.