Sorry, my wretched knowledge of the English language won't give me any chance to detect the meaning of the first sentence of your reply. To answer the second one: of course they are! Even more, I stuffed almost every .ocx and .dll I could find on my PC into the path of the application, tried to run the EXE from command line with -d switch, checked the registry and what not.

A question due to my lacking experience with run time libraries: Why would the small EXE (containing LOADPICTURE() solely) deliver the correct result, while the same line of code in the billing application (executed in the same location) failed?

Maybe the varying behavior comes from different settings of the two projects? I'm not very familiar with the project manager.