Conflict between jQuery animations

I’m fairly new to jQuery, so it’s possible I’m missing something that more experienced users will consider obvious, but here goes anyway. I have an animated main menu that uses slideDown() to show the sub-menus, triggered by the .hover() event on the parent. There’s another animation on the home page that uses jCarousel to rotate the items in a <ul> every three seconds. Whenever a hover event on a parent menu item coincides with the animation trying to load a new frame, the menu freezes until the other animation is loaded. As common as animated menus are these days, I can’t believe I’m the only one who has ever come up against this problem.

What I want is for the menu animation to take precedence no matter what, but I understand that JS has no “priority” feature (not being multi-threaded) - so what’s the solution here?

Thanks for your responses, guys, and sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to this thread (busy day yesterday.)

@JimmyP - It would be pretty hard to create a test page with all the factors that are in play here, but you did clarify one important point - since animations execute at intervals anyway, there’s no reason that separate instances couldn’t execute simultaneously (from the user’s perspective, anyway.)

@kriscahya - I’m afraid you completely lost me. Is noConflict() a built-in method of jQuery? If so, how does it work? You seem to be using jQuery() and $() as though they were separate functions, but my understanding is that they are aliases of one another. Then again, I may have missed your whole point altogether.

As it turns out, I believe I’ve fixed my current problem by switching to jCarousel Lite, which, although it’s missing a feature that I’m going to have to hack, seems to “play nice” with my other animations. It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if I run into this problem again in the future, so I’m still interested in any thoughts anyone might have on the subject.

Animations do not occur synchronously (insofar as they occur at intervals) so there may be some other factor blocking the UI…

If you could create a demo page just with the conflicting code it would definitely help to narrow down the issue.

Hi,
I’m also not an expert in javascript, how about using this jquery no conflict

<html>
  <head>
  <script src="prototype.js"></script>
  <script src="jquery.js"></script>
  <script>
    jQuery.noConflict();
    // Use jQuery via jQuery(...)
    jQuery(document).ready(function(){
        jQuery("div").hide();
    });
    // Use Prototype with $(...), etc.
    $('someid').hide();
  </script>
  </head>
  <body></body>
</html>

cheers