I'm referring to your images being on your hard drive in the same folder as your application.exe.

When debugging, VS.NET uses the "bin" folder to put your app.exe. If you use the (Application.StartupPath & "\image.bmp") syntx that means that it gets the image from the same location as your exe application.

Then put your images in the bin folder for testing

If you used VB6 that old syntx was app.path... it is now Application.StartupPath

Understand?