How do I show a background throughout a series of questionnaire items? (case 4767)

I need to present images to participants and allow them to chose an image. The issue I am having is that there are many steps to this process. So I need to show a pair of images for 3 seconds. Then play an audio asking them to make a choice. Then show a scale for either top or bottom. This is the first part but is sufficient for this example. I need the same image shown for all three sections--the wait, the audio, and the scale response. The problem is that every time MediaLab moves to a new section of the questionnaire the screen appears to refresh. Now, at this point I am admittedly using a background image for each section of the questionnaire BUT I have the same image registered as the background image for the whole questionnaire within the .exp file that calls it. So theoretically, the .exp file should lay the background and any refresh should just go over the background and there shouldn't be any visible flickering which is what I see now. It is fast on this machine running xp but on my win7 x64 machine the background will disappear altogether and show just a gray screen (I have gray as the background for the experiment) and a few milliseconds later, the background will refresh.

So all I want is for the background to stay consistent and stable across a series of questionnaire sections. How can this be accomplished in MediaLab 2012 on either an xp system or a win7 x64?

Would it suffice to have the three steps you mention occur within the same item? I ask because there is no way to eliminate the temporary blank between items (except for with the repeated components of thought listing and recall items which are actually considered to be 1 item). The three steps you described could be combined as one. Using a question onset parameter could delay the appearence of the question for 3 seconds (i.e., after the image appears) and a fixed delay could be inserted at the start of the sound file(s). However, I'm not sure if you were simply using that sequence of events to illustrate your point. Hope that made some sense!