Tabs with Rotate - Background Image Rollovers have delay in IE7+

Tabs with Rotate - Background Image Rollovers have delay in IE7+

I am using the rotate feature of the Tabs method similar to the featured content slider from  http://webdeveloperplus.com/jquery/featured-content-slider-using-jquery-ui/

My navigation menu uses background images. When rolling over them and off them, only in IE, there is a 1 second delay. It doesn't matter if the image is loaded in, you can keep rolling over the image and there's a huge delay. 

Taking out the background images makes it run faster, but I'll need those. Should I write a rollover function to overwrite it?