Wanting to fix all my past mistakes, here is an updated ImageFast library that doesn't rely on System.Drawing for init...
Boy is that embarassing when your code only works on YOUR machine. And then it doesn't always do that apparently either. Well, I found the problem and fixed it, so you should be able to use ImageFast in a number of scenarios. You can use it within console applications, it still works well with Windows Forms, and you can also use it from within ASP .NET. There are so many reasons that you might want to load images 10 to 100 times faster than you can with the validating loaders of the Image class.
ImageFast: A stand-alone library for quickly loading GDI+ images without validation.