Hmm good list of changes, if I knew you were going to be that thorough I would of had a quick skim over the source to tidy things up. I am sure if you run cppCheck you will get a lot of changes too.
I ignore bad code simply to produce output
Unsure about your error. Are you saying that it is only from when you run the app from visual studio that it crashes? Can you run the Debug exe manually from the Debug directory?
My Debug build also creates some files in a directory called "Debug Files", the game crashes I think if it cannot find this directory. You may need to copy that to the Debug Directory. Does the release work?
I would still set the working Directory to
$(ProjectDir)/../../sourceSet Project Properties / Debugging / Working Directory to
$(ProjectDir)/../../sourceGood Luck.
Well at least I have learned that I really should go over my code and clean it up, and make it much more exception safe, before I ever make a serious code release.