It's not clear to me what you are trying to achieve with this code: the "start" image appears and I seem to be able to drag it left/right pretty smoothly, doesn't seem to take long to redraw...
What system are you on?
There are a few things that look odd to me; I'm not clear why you are using a png image to set the blue background, rather than just drawing a fill colour, or setting the widget colour...
What are you hoping to do? Maybe if you can describe what you want, we can suggest a better way to get there?