Tutorial crashes on VC++ 2005

Greetings.

I'm loosing a battle with aspell-dev-0-50-3-3\lib\aspell-15.lib. Here's 
my VC++ 2005 code:

#include "../aspell-dev-0-50-3-3/include/aspell.h"
#pragma comment ( lib, "../aspell-dev-0-50-3-3/lib/aspell-15.lib" )

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    //
    // Prepare the configuration for the speller initialization.
    //
    AspellConfig* spellConfig = new_aspell_config();
    aspell_config_replace(spellConfig, "lang", "en_US");
    aspell_config_replace(spellConfig, "dict-dir", "C:/Program 
Files/Aspell/dict");

    //
    // Try to create and initialize a new speller.
    //
    AspellCanHaveError* possibleError = new_aspell_speller(spellConfig); 
// <- Yikes!

    AspellSpeller* speller = NULL;
    if (aspell_error_number(possibleError) != 0)
    {
        const char* errorMessage = aspell_error_message(possibleError);
        // No dictionary has been found.
    }
    else
    {
        speller = to_aspell_speller(possibleError);
    }

    return 0;
}

As long as the Aspell doesn't find the proper dictionary, the 
errorMessage indicates "No word lists can be found for the language 
...", however in case it finds the dict, everything crases violently 
(terminate-like failure). I couldn't find anything helpful in the 
existing mailing archive, so I'm forced to ask for help.

Best regards
- - Mario