How to prevent email refresh while viewing email in Windows 8?

I am running Windows 8 Enterprise in VMware 8.0.3 and the VM has 5GB of RAM.

When I am reading Gmail in the WinRT Mail app, the list of emails and the preview/view pane will frequently disappear completely while it refreshes or something. This may be happening in Hotmail as well, but I use Gmail more frequently.

I thought maybe it was pinging the mail server too often so I modified the settings to:

Download new mail: Every 15 Min

However it is still happening.

It is hard to read email when the screen keeps blanking out while the app refreshes. Does anyone know why this is happening or how to control it?

Intel graphics drivers on the host are going to exhibit these sorts of problems until Intel fixes their drivers. It also occurs on VMware Workstation 9, by the way. In the guest, run the Chrome browser with hardware acceleration disabled, and disable desktop effects (make sure dwm.exe isn't running) in the meantime to workaround it.

May also occur with other non-Intel graphics drivers.