I'm struggling with this, maybe some of you can help...

- I have a home page slideshow with large images at www.theoribeiro.com using jQuery Cycle plugin

- Images are large and sometimes with slow connections (but even in fast ones) the behavior of the slideshow start is pretty ugly, showing the image all of a sudden or half-loaded.

- I want to make sure that at least the 2 or 3 first images are loaded before the slideshow starts and meanwhile I want to run a loading animated gif, then I want to fade in the first image. 

I searched a lot on the internet and on the forums and tried loads of stuff with my limited knowledge of javascript and jQuery but could't come up with a solution.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!