local async image loading... any possible hacks?

Indeed. My bad. I am loading the images from the internet so that does introduce a natural delay for each image coming down in an asynch manner. My code (thanks mpappas!!!) does check for local cache though so next time I load the same tableView all gets pulled from local storage and I still don’t have a freeze. Having said that these are small image files and there are not that many so perhaps that is why I am not experiencing a freeze.