Controls "pausing" Each Other?

I have a "wallboard" type application, which contains a number of visual components clock, RSS feeds, call queue information, custom message ticker and a handful of other labels that update when certain conditions are met). There are no user controls.Most of these are either custom controls, or just labels that get updated under certain conditions (triggered by events running on timers).However, my problem is this: when any visual data change is triggered, the RSS feeds refreshed, labels values changed etc, all the other visual aspects momentarily pause. This would be fine if it was a rare event, but my timers that trigger the data refreshactivate every few seconds.Mostly, the data retrieval itself runs on backgroundworker components, triggered from timers, it's purely the updating of the values that appears to cause the freezing of all the other controls (most noticable on the custom control RSS feed ticker - whichitself causes problems with other controls when it tries to refresh itself also). All these components function perfectly when isolated from all the other controls.

So my question is this, what is the best way for me to stop this freezing/pausing behaviour? I've looked into threading, background workers, mutex's, monitors but all the information I've found seems to relate more to running complex data analysis in thebackground than updating a display.