IDE icons disappear

The BlitzPlus IDE icons will no longer display as of yesterday. I can roll mouse over small thin blank gray areas to get text to pop up, eg "close", "home", "back", "forward" "save" etc. but no icons like the light blub to close the current file. the debugger icons are there and display fine. I tried showing/hidding icons, which didn't make a difference.

I have tried deleting blitzide.prefs a few times, and reinstalling the BlitzPlus software itself multiple times. The behavior for uninstall-then-reinstall is exactly the same, whether I update to the latest 141 or not:

The first time I run BlitzPlus (ie there is no blitzide.prefs file yet), the icons appear fine but then I close it (and the blitzide.prefs file gets created), the next time I open BlitzPlus the icons aren't there.

It started yesterday when I started up BlitzPlus either while Firefox was starting up, or iTunes was starting (both take more than a few seconds to start always). Rebooting/restaring my machine didn't seem to have any effect either.

In \BlitzPlus\cfg\ there is a file called ide_toolbar.bmp - however, the blitzprefs seems to like to call this "toolbar.bmp" but of course it is wrong. I know it's wrong because I tried renaming the file ide_toolbar.bmp to toolbar.bmp, and it still didn't work; editing blitzide.prefs' line to

img_toolbar ide_ toolbar.bmp

still didn't display my IDE icons.

Also, when I run the IDE for the first time immediately after an install (ie w/out a blitzide.prefs file), and I try putting an ide_toolbar.bmp/toolbar.bmp into the BlitzPlus dir instead of \cfg dir, BlitzPlus actually recognizes something as wrong and displays an error message instead of starting up, that being "toolbar bitmap cannot be found" or something like that (similar to a B3D thread problem). I've also tried renaming the .prefs line to full path, renaming it to relative path from the .exe in dir above it, but no luck.

Win2k with current updates. DirectX 8.1... if you want system specs let me know but I don't think it's relevant to this. I have relatively older hw but it was all working fine for many months before this.

Update- still bizarre, but I installed to a different path location, and the icons appear perfectly fine in the IDE again.

I tried it in a newly created directory, and then in Program Files\BlitzPlus2 (the default is Program Files\BlitzPlus, without the 2 that I added manually) but in both cases, the icons appear correctly- as long as it wasn't unpacked to the default location path (where it was installed originally). It's something about the directory Program Files\BlitzPlus since this started for me.

I had both installs in default and non-default paths simultaneously, and tried copying over the files and directories from the default dir (incorrect behavior) to non-default dir (works fine). The only thing that seemed to matter whatsoever was that it was running from in the default directory- anywhere else works fine except from there, even copying the same exact files over. Note I haven't touched anything in the Registry at all. Maybe something is resident there or corrupted?

It is just so strangely consistent- I have no idea why the same files work fine outside the installed dir but not inside it. The blitzide.prefs file calls it "toolbar.bmp" but the actual file name is ide_toolbar.bmp in \cfg.