After the DOM is ready, IE will not show page content when Javascript is modifying the DOM? (but Firefox will show)

Question

I have a page that will initialize jCarousel when the DOM is ready (by jQuery's $(document).ready()), but on IE 8, the page is not displayed until jCarousel has finished initializing, which can be 1 minute later. On Firefox and Chrome, the page content is shown right away, while letting jCarousel do its job.

So is it true that IE will not show any page content until it finds out the DOM is not modified for some time (such as 0.5 seconds?)

(I also used setTimeout() to delay initializing jCarousel -- the page content will show fast, but when the initialization is running finally, IE 8 will freeze up -- unresponsive to user action such as page scroll, so it is not a good solution either).