what do you mean by a simple application? Do you use MFC or any other
FrameWork or is it a place simple console application.
If you use frameworks like MFC then you would require to build the
application in release mode and then use it on the target machine. If you
use debug build then your application might use the debug versions of the
dll like say MFC42D.DLL for MFC4.2 instead or MFC42.DLL. Dubug dlls are not
present on systems which does not have development tools like VC++
installed.
However, if the above case were true then you should not have got lockups in
your application. You should have seen popup error messages telling you that
the dll was not found. Try eliminating other problems like uninitialized
variables, eliminate all warning in your build and other similar things.