Closing the loop on this; the flickering, frozen UI turned out to be because loading images from a resource file was occurring in a user thread. It's unclear why loading images should be an EDT process, and it seems undesirable to me that such a CPU and IO intensive process should run there.
The hard crash attributed to loading images on demand turned out to be a code generation bug (of yours) which I have filed a issue and test case. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CodenameOne Discussions" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to codenameone-discussions+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/codenameone-discussions. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/codenameone-discussions/805d42ce-b652-44dd-bb51-84bbdf1a58e7%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
