Is it possible to have a completely flickerless solution

While it is possible to have an application that does not do full page postbacks *at all*, it is extreamly difficult to achieve and presents many problems (think [development time] = [normal dev time] x 10 instead of the usual 3!).

The update panel is the first step towards achieving this in a simplistic manner (i.e. where you don't really have to think about it too much to achieve amazing results).

It is not a good idea to produce a real world application using this CTP release considering that it is likely to go through a number of iterations before settling on a solid ground. So you might find that during the process you end up having to deal with many problem sand issues.

Check out Cognos Report NET if you can. they have written an report writting application which runs in a browser and you can not even tell that it is (at all!). It looks like windows, feels like windows and behaves just like windows!

I'm not aware of any flickering on my Atlas applications.

Could this be a bug or a setup type issue? (ie. I think Scott Guthrie mentioned something about flickering if you had a CSS loading that used a background image reference)

Though the current CTP release is a good step towards a flickerless solution, I feel there is still time before committing to an end client a flickerless solution based on the current CTP release.

Don't use CSS images (background, items, etc).