Oh @DD77... You really make it hard for us to help you.
I know it sounds wingy but you need to make a bit more of an effort to make it easy for people to look at your code. You need to make as simple as you can otherwise you won't get attention. We only have so much time to spend around here that we cannot afford an hour or two going over one person's code if there is four or five others with questions and a much smaller code base to look at.
Also, by making it as small as an example you can, you will probably end up seeing ways of simplifying your own code.
You didn't even change the title of the pen... One does not know which pen one is looking without refering to the thread.
There is so much code in both of your examples that I think your issue is that you have tangled yourself and have too many side-effects in your functions that are causing trouble.
Your preloader, for example:
- You have a tween inside 'loadProgress' targeting 'progressTl' - But up to that point in your code there is no object declared with a name of 'progressTl'.
- Then, afterwards, you do define a 'progressTl' with an onUpdate and an onComplete calls. Why are you returning a timeline on your onComplete? It's not doing anything that return statement. And on your onUpdate you are calling a progressUpdate but, in there you are calculating a 'loadingProgress' variable that you already had calculated in your previous loadProgress function.
I have no familiarity with jQuery so, I don't know what the .progress() bit is doing but I guess it is calling the given function a set number of times. Is it calling it everytime the loading of the image updated?
And all of that is without even looking at your slider example...