A pretty good bet is that it's not finding your bitmaps. When running it from the IDE, unless you specify otherwise, it is probably going to run the .exe from the Debug or Release directories, but the working directory is the project directory, so that's where it looks for the files you open. If you run the program outside the IDE, the working directory is the same as that of the .exe, so that's where your images should be.

Hi, i have made a simple program in c++ and directx. The user controls a robot that he can make walk around. The prgram works fine if i execute it in visual c++, but when i try running the .exe from outside visual c++ the screen goes black for a second and then stops and returns to windows. I would really appreciate any help as i havent a clue whats wrong. Thanks. Later!

Thanks a lot that really helped me.