I've been having a blast porting a large project that uses CEGUI from Linux to Windows over the past week; yes that is oooozing sarcasm
Anyway, I initially built CEGUI to use the DevIL codec (using the pre-built dependencies for msvc 2010) but I was getting errors on loading png files. The error originated from the codec layer, not the resource manager which found and read the file fine. I switched to freeimage instead and everything worked fine with no other changes.My platform info....
Windows 8
MSVC 2010 (all projects using /MD so msvcr100.dll)
CEGUI 0.7.7