Winforms applications flicker quite a bit when you have TableLayoutPanels, Panels, etc especially when the forms/controls are resized and/or have background images. The cause for the the flicker is simple – excessive repainting, both at design-time as well as the runtime. The solution – double-buffering; when repainting the graphics on a control, .net uses a in-built buffer for rendering the contents; by enabling double-buffering, the same control maintains two buffers – one for the original contents and the other for manipulating them. The two buffers however use more memory, but the results produced are almost flicker-free.

There are two fairly simple solutions to reduce (not completely eliminate) the flicker…..

a. Set the Styles properties on the parent form/user control to be double-buffered….

public MyUserControl()
{
	SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint | ControlStyles.DoubleBuffer | ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, true);
	InitializeComponent();
}

b. Don’t use the regular panels, instead create your own overridden ones which implement double buffering.

public partial class BufferedPanel : Panel
{
	public BufferedPanel()
	{

		SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint |
		ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer |
		ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
	}

	public BufferedPanel(IContainer container)
	{
		container.Add(this);

		SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint |
		ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer |
		ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
	}
}


public partial class BufferedTableLayoutPanel : TableLayoutPanel
    {
        public BufferedTableLayoutPanel()
        {
            
            SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint |
              ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer |
              ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
        }

        public BufferedTableLayoutPanel(IContainer container)
        {
            container.Add(this);
            
            SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint |
              ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer |
              ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
        }
    }

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/features/article.aspx?editorialsid=1273