After living with the freezing and flashing problem for months, this thread pointed me in the right direction to solving the problem, but it requires admin rights. What worked for me was enabling 'Turn off background refresh of group policy' in gpedit.msc which prevents group policy updates while the computer is in use. I posted more detailed instructions on stack exchange at: arcgis 10.5 - Arcmap table of contents flashes and system becomes unresponsive episodically on windows 10 - Geographic I…
... View more