Best approach for accellerating batch export of jpgs/pngs

To all who continously amaze me with their knowledge of scripting arcana.....here's some lead to transmogrify into gold.

I've ironed out kinks of how to script a batch-export metadata and generate bitmap artwork (of whatever type) for a complicated set of folders holding .ai files. My script finds all of the AI files, exports the metadata to a text file, captures and logs errors without crashing, and opens each file to generate my full-size thumbnail.

Works great, but isn't built for speed. The extraction of the metadata is blisteringly fast, but from what I can see I have to actually tell Illustrator to open the file before I can export the jpg or png, which forces illustrator to render the screen before doing the export.

Is there any way to speed this up? Opening in preview mode (not scriptable?) still results in the calculation of the visibility and blurs, even though they aren't displayed.

Would love to learn that I've made another beginner's assumption...maybe having bridge do it instead might be better?

Thanks all

-Alex