Don't use CreateGraphics.

Unless you have a really good reason to, always draw all your UserControls inside OnPaint.

I really hate it when controls flicker. Flickering cannot be solved by getting a newer processer. It is not a problem with the speed of a video card. In computer graphics, it is often faster and easier to simply erase part of a window and redraw it rather than figuring out which individual pixel needs to be updated. Flickering is caused when a background colour is painted before the foreground graphics is painted. The problem is that on windows, each time you paint a pixel you're painting directly to video memory. The rendering of the background color (usually white) is visible for a split second before the foreground pixels are painted over the background.

One big mistake that people make when they write Windows Forms user-controls with DoubleBuffering enabled is that they try to draw onto a control outside of the OnPaint method. This is usually accomplished by creating a graphics context using Control.CreateGraphics in some other event handler and then drawing on the resulting context. This will bypass the inbuilt double buffering support in Windows Forms as you will be drawing directly to video memory rather than to an offscreen buffer.

If a control needs to be updated in response to some event/action, the state of the control should be changed by changing the appropriate variables and then a combination of the Control.Invalid, Control.Update, and Control.Refresh methods should be used to inform the control to redraw itself.

One side-effect of people using CreateGraphics (apart from control flickering), is that they sometimes draw graphics on the control and forget to draw it inside the OnPaint method. This means that the control will not draw itself properly if the control needs to be updated because of external causes (for example, if a window that was once overlapping the control moves).

I've seen this kind of mistake in a simple clock control. In response to a timer event, the developer calls CreateGraphics and paints the new time. The OnPaint method is never overridden. This appears to work most of the time but if a window is dragged over and then off the control, the custom drawn graphics for the control will be missing until the next timer event fires. Composition in Vista with composition (Aero) turned on actually prevents this from actually being much of a problem but I still think it's a nasty way to program controls.