If the carousel is used with a view that has a limiting argument then attempting to click past the start or end of the carousel causes the browser to freeze for about 5-10 seconds before giving an 'unresponsive script error'.

The problem is that the value 'total' sent as a setting to JS is still the total number of nodes without the argument rather than what the view is actually showing.
The argument I am using is from ReferencedByFilter.module, but I imagine this would happen with something like a term ID argument.

I think the immediate problem is that $view->real_args doesn't exist for D5 -- at least I can't find the string 'real_args' anywhere in the views module folder!

But looking at the code in more detail, I don't understand the point of getting $total_rows in this way. Is the pager meant to interact with the carousel in some way? How would the carousel get hold of items beyond the current page? Plus, why would anyone use a pager with a carousel anyway?
I'm rather baffled by what the intention is there, so I've replaced that whole chunk of if/else logic in my copy of this module with:

  $total_rows = count($nodes);