Thanks for your reply.

First I have tried to comment the dubious function out but this caused an access violation when starting oxygene.

Then I tried to update the SDL_image which caused a domino effect as it required a new sdl.dll then a libpng13.dll and finally a zlib1.dll. Once I have installed all these libraries I got the message that the entry point for IMG_string_equals was not found. Great.

I also tried to comment the function out using the new libraries but starting oxygene raised the visual studio jit-debugger so it wasn't successful as well