Yeah, I remember disabling Genesis slideshow on my website a few years ago as I was having the same issue. Small extra files like that really make a different for overall site performance and user experience.
I’m a bit of fickler for performance and speed after my experience of optimizing my sites speed down to a 1.5 second load time and going from 5k unique hits per month to 20k and ranking for a few dozen terms.
Do you think the code above might work if written properly? I based it on Justin’s article: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/08/06/how-to-disable-scripts-and-styles and I know I’m probably missing just a silly detail.
I look forward to seeing what you find.