In a site that's now Drupal 7.28, Views Slideshow 7.x-3.1 with JQuery Cycle had been working successfully for a long time, displaying a cycling set of 8 photos with cross-dissolve transitions (meaning, the transition "fade" and with "sync" on). It is set to display a content type "photo_frontpage_slideshow." At some point recently during the course of various updates, it has stopped working correctly. Now – depending on the exact slideshow settings – it either displays a blank screen between each content item alternating image - blank - image, etc.), OR it displays a few of them correctly cross-dissolved, but then skips to blank displays. 

The blank screens display for the same duration as specified for the images. I tried going back to earlier versions of Views and JQuery but there was no improvement in this problem. The image set had not changed from the time when all was working correctly, but I also tried deleting and re-uploading all images to the same content type. When viewed with Firebug, the transition points can be seen and the opacity numbers are animating as expected. But it's not always displaying the image to apply a transition to.

Suggestions on why this might happen and how to fix? Thanks.