Currently, when you load a layout and the XML contains a lot of windows, even though they may not all be visible, I have to set the Visible property to false on the RadDock control to eliminate some funky refreshes are visible to the user (something we want to avoid). I also wanted to mention that using SuspendLayout/ResumeLayout instead of using Visible=false/true does not work.  Maybe this is something the development team can investigate at some point as well.