GDI+ coding questions

Good afternoon gentlemen, I have been working on some GDI+ gauges, but I seem to have some problems. I have both a PFD/MFD as well as two separate engine gauges all made with GDI+. The problem is that I get very bad frames with all of them at once. Less than 10 frames, while with other commercial GDI+ airplanes I get over 30 frames. I tried making a timer and uopdating them only 15 times a second, even once a second, but the frames did not improve much(maybe 4 frames per second, the most) I use a class drawing system, with a "DUMMY" gauge that only opens/closes GDI+. I am not sure how to proceed with this. For the second question, in the MFD I have a MAP mode that displays airports/navaids. I load them from the dafif database in an array of chars, and only use the database at PRE_INSTALL. Is this the way to go, or should I load them each time I update my gauge?Thank you very much for your help in advance.