Particle Effect with Texture Sheet starts later than all other particle emitters?

I am toying around with a particle emitter using a texture sheet/atlas, and for some reason whenever I use this atlas the particle emitter starts about half of a second later than the other particle emitters. My suspicions are that this has to do with the texture sheet.

Details:
409kb file size
8x4 sprites (32 total)
128x256px wxh for each sprite
empty background is 100% alpha (not black)

For some reason unity also freezes up after some time of using this texture sheet. Any ideas what might be happening?

Thanks!
~Mike

 

I'm still having this issue (not the freezing, that has been resolved with the latest release of Unity). It seems that the particle goes through a full cycle before starting to render the texture sheet animations. I am triggering the particle system by enabling the emitter in C#. Is there a better way to do it?