Hi Jean, thanks for the reply. Maybe I did overlook that, I'll try it.
But here's the bigger picture . . . maybe you can confirm if my strategy makes sense. The textures are used in an NGUI submenu that consists of a collection/list of sprites that are generated from a prefab when the users clicks a button on the main menu (by running through a Hashtable GetNext operation).
My thought was that to avoid perception of lag, I should load the assetbundle textures when the app first starts, store them in a correlating Hashtable, and then just assign them when the prefab/menu items are generated.
The problem basically is that while I seem to be successfully loading from the assetbundle, I can't actually access the textures to do anything with them - they aren't even appearing in the Hierarchy after instantiation, which seems odd, no?
Anyway, I'll try what you suggested, and I have one other fall-back idea to try, and we'll see. Really don't want to throw up the white flag on this one! :-)
Thanks again for your input, Jean, always appreciated.