Thanks everyone for your ideas. Alex, I already knew how to do the serialization by encoding/decoding, and I may go down that path someday, but if FileStream would just serialize a ContentCache (seems like a common want), it would have been a quick improvement to app responsiveness.
Having to write my own serializing logic pushes this down on our priorities list since improving app responsiveness is more of a "nice to have" and not a high priority. I'm going to drop this idea for now. Thanks again for your insights, everyone. Erik