Slide is Extremely Slow to Load

Hi Heroes,

I am working on a biosafety course. Early in the course, I introduce you (the learner) to your co-worker, Sharon, and together you and Sharon go to the whiteboard in your shared office in order to perform a hazard analysis on the experiment you are planning.

The interaction is working fine except for two things:

•  The activity is introduced on this slide:

When the learner clicks OK it takes an absurdly long time for the next page to load. Admittedly, the next page is kind of a monster in terms of the number of buttons and states and layers and triggers, but still. Ugh. It's not really usable if it takes this long to load because most learners will assume the course has frozen and stopped working if they encounter such a long load time (upwards of 2 full minutes!).

So my first question is: What can I do to improve the load time?

• When the slide does finally load, the learner is invited to click any empty cell in the Controls column to choose the appropriate controls for that step of the experiment ("controls" are methods for protecting yourself from hazards of the work--for example, wearing eye protection to protect yourself from getting biohazardous material splashed in your eye):

After the learner selects controls for a given step of the experiment, his or her choices are indicated with small square tiles in the Controls column, and the learner is invited to roll his or her mouse pointer over the tiles to learn more about them:

In the screen-capture, above, I've rolled over the centrifuge controls tile, which causes a Show Layer trigger to execute and display this panel of info about the centrifuge controls.

The problem I'm having is that the rollovers work fine on all the other tiles, but on the centrifuge controls tile, there seem to be a lot of "dead" spots and mouse positions where the layer shows then immediately hides and then immediately shows and...etc. creating a flickering loop. It's impossible to read the text when the layer is flickering on and off like this.

Question 2: What's causing that flickering behavior and how can I fix it?

I've extracted just these two slides from the course and published them to Articulate Review here: https://360.articulate.com/review/content/0b4d9124-9b51-4ccd-aac0-d343e02baa6e/review. When you click OK on the first slide, you have to be REALLY patient (!), but the next slide does (eventually) load. It actually loads a bit faster in this version (with just the two slides) than it does in the full course. I need to fix that load time, though.

I've also attached the Articulate 360 source, containing these two slides.

I'm hoping someone has a better sense of how to get this working than I do. 

Thanks!

    -Ray