Thanks, It seems UI will always tick even when paused. I found the problem though, it was a strange interaction with the OnInitialize UMG event; since Construct happens before all the data is initialized in the new widget, I set it to refresh OnInitialize, which was also had problems with all the data being available right away which caused the icons to act strangely.
I set my refresh function to happen on a Do Once on tick and that seemed to work. 