Thanks for the url's! I think that I had a number of issues with my renderer. One thing was that I was not setting the data property as [Bindable] so I don't believe that it was properly being set and/or dispatching the dataChange event. Secondly, (as you mentioned) there may have been a recycling issue. What I ended up doing was scrapping the idea of extending my item renderer off of some pre-existing class (such as Image or HBox) and extending UIComponent, then overriding all the methods to take full control over my renderer. This seemed to really do that trick!
I also found a series written by Peter Ent to be extremely helpful: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/pent/archives/2008/03/itemrenderers_p_1.html
