Processing message not showing (largish table ~3000 rows)

I've set a version of

$('.dataTables_processing').css('visibility','visible')

in several places ('fnPreDrawCallback', th click event, etc), but it never shows, unless I interrupt the browser with an alert(). Note that I say a version, as I have multiple tables on a page and tried caching the element using a more optimized version of:

oTable.closest('.dataTables_wrapper').data('processing', oTable.closest('.dataTables_wrapper').find('.dataTables_processing') )

Is there someplace we can setTimeout(0) to free the browser for displaying. Note: sorting takes a bit of time on such a large table, so that message would be very necessary.

Also, I'm using this in combination of Twitter's Bootstrap library - perhaps that just doesn't play nicely with dataTables