I may be able to relate your problem to a problem that I was having a few years ago with C++ windows forums application. I was loading pictures into the background and manipulating them. Every time I manipulated them the pictures would flicker, every time I moved the forum around on the screen the picture would flicker. I found out that this was caused by the image quality being to high and my GPU not being able to update the picture fast enough causing a flicker. To verify that this is the problem replace the picture with a small 1-2kb png file and see if it still flickers. If it doesn't then your picture quality is two high. You can use the same picture but need to lower the size. You can go to
http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx[
^] and reduce the file size to stop the flickering.