So on the recent xfce version (4.14) but not on 4.14-pre2 (and also not on any other version nor any other DE I ever used) I encountered flickering in panels or in transparent windows when something updated. I also experience sluggerish / stuttering behaviour of any windows I dragged. No matter what is in .config or it's subfolders it always happen when I either copy a xfce4-session.xml with <property name="chooser" type="empty"><property name="AlwaysDisplay" type="bool" value="true"/</property> included or when I enable the equivalent option in xfce4-session-settings that sets that enables this property in the xfce4-session.xml. Well.. Actually that option can be set and no problems occur until at least one session is saved in .cache/sessions. If no session is saved there then no problems occur and the chooser won't be displayed after startxfce4 is executed. I'm on Arch Linux Kernel: 5.2.8-arch1-1-ARCH with btrfs as the main file system. It also happens on the 4.9 lts kernel. It doesn't matter wether any kernel options are set. I'm using a Notebook (GL62 7RD REV:1.0). I used the Intel graphics card when I experienced this issue; haven't tested with the nvidia card.
Sorry, I'm not sure I see or understand the connection between session saving / or seeing the session chooser, and the flickering. The latter probably stems from Xfwm4 not playing nicely with your graphics driver or configuration. The only difference having a saved session makes is that the startup order of daemons may be different - you can actually configure it in the "Current Session" tab and save the session to get the order / priority and restart style you want. Other than that there is little or no difference as to how daemons are started.
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