Hi!
So one organic question is rising here – why is there an option to disable AJAX if without it the mechanism is not working? What is the point of giving the user an option to ruin the normal flow of things?!
I’m not sure that it require AJAX to work properly. AJAX is supposed to load items after click, and disabling AJAX should load all items in background when page is loaded, so after clicking it will not do any further image requests.
I’m still pretty much sure that this is a bug in a theme.
Is there any way to analyze this problem further with developers?