shuddering initial frame, dump-emacs, source

[Joe Corneli]

The look of my emacs is pretty heavily customized (font, color,
absence of menubar, etc. are different from the standard settings).
When I load Emacs, it shudders and flashes spasmodically as it
transforms itself from the white background with a small font and a
menubar to the black background with a large font and no menubar.
I've considered running dump-emacs (but I can't get it to work, can
anyone?) - and other than that I don't know how to change the style
of the default frame. Is there a way to change the load order so
that Emacs never goes into the small font, white background mode?
Maybe I should rebuild by hand?  Any suggestions?  What are people
using to deal with heavily customized emaces?