One last follow up:
I’ve been banging my head against the wall for weeks trying to determine what was breaking not only my front page slideshow, but also the Fancybox (lightbox) gallery plugin. After disabling and reactivating various plugins in countless combinations, I finally isolated cForms II (v 11.5) as the cause.
More specifically, the “Global Settings -> Popup Date Picker” was enabled. As soon as I disabled this setting, the jquery conflict disappeared and everything went back to normal. Unfortunately, I can’t use the popup date picker in forms anymore.