CE,
Many thanks. I did end up trying that as well. I set CEGUI to build multithreaded debug dll's. No joy. This is what i get in my app now upon execution:
LDR: LdrpWalkImportDescriptor() failed to probe d:\Personal\CEGUI-Input-with-Transparent-Windows\Debug\CEGUIBase_d.dll for its manifest, ntstatus 0xc0150002
>From the net: The root cause that you get "The application failed to initialize properly..." is because your application cannot find SP1 version of Visual C++ Library, which is required by the dll.
In looking at Irrlicht vcproj file, it looks like the library is built as static by default, and I'm building cegui as dll, so I suspect I still have something mismatched in the rabbit hole I find myself in...and of course release build works just fine!!!
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)