I have been developing an application, and I have been trying to figure out how resources work. The online MSDN help does not work for what I am trying to do. My program will have a lot of images(about 8) on the main form, and I want the user to be able to customize them. The problem is if they are embedded you have to recompile for it to work.

I want the form to simply look at the Application.Startpath + "\\layout\\" location for the image. I tried to do this manually in the constructor, form load, and even in the designer file for the form. The constructor(after initialize components) and form load caused the images to take 2 seconds to load after the form is displayed(not acceptable). And since the old images were added in the resource cache previously, it just keeps rewriting my code. I got it to work for one form, but not the other. Every time I change it, the IDE changes it back to embedded. All my resource files have been deleted, and the IDE keeps remaking the form.resx one itself. I hope this is enough of an explanation, can someone please help me understand how to fix this?

Basically the old resource information is hosing up my form's images. If I manually change them, it doesn't show in the environment. If I add them back in, it makes them embedded automatically, even using "Local Linked" resources. I am confused.