Ok, let my clarify.

There is nothing wrong with the code, no errors or exceptions occur.
The app works perfectly well without the jar file on its own,
recognising all the external files (.jpg and .txt) and loading
them into the app as expected. (No problems here).

When I put them into my jar file, which is executable, they increase
the file size as expected, but when I double click my Jar file,
the app works as normal but with all the .jpg images missing!
Thats the problem. I tried putting them into a seperate folder,
but it made no difference.  If I put the jar file back into the
folder with all the images, then it works fine, because it is still
looking for those images and not the ones I put inside the jar file.
I hope all this makes sense,  I don't intend posting 0ver 300 lines of
code, I guess that would annoy a few people.

many thx Peter.