Perhaps not exactly the same issue but , personally, I switched to using PhysFS which is like a virtual file system.
Basically you can create a single ( or multiple ) zip file containing all your images, data files etc and access it from your application as if this stuff was located on the filesystem.
This is a free (lgpl) software and according to the author, the design was somewhat inspired by Quake 3's file subsystem.
http://www.icculus.org/physfs/
This code compiles out of the box with VC++ - it does take a bit of tweaking to get it working with EVC ( if anyone is interested I do have a working dll/lib combo for arm arch.)