One thing that might help is to use a sprite. It's where you combine your regular and "hover" image into one image (usually stacked on top of each other. Then, in the css, you use "background-position" to move the background image on a hover. This way there will not be the flicker.
As for your question as hand, do you have the function MM_preloadImages() defined in your webpage? I know it's a dreamweaver function, but sometimes dreamweaver forgets to add it (if you undo or something like that).