Sorry for the late response. I haven't seen any posts in quite a while so I haven't visited as often as usual. It is entirely intentional that these releases stop working. These releases are mostly placebo for those thinking there is nothing here but vaporware. I don't consider them much of a release yet and they by-pass the steam requirement, so I put time/date restrictions on them. A by product of the later is that these releases should work even easier than a normal release would. You can literally start T-IR from where ever you want. The only catch is if you want the Starmap to shade worlds green when you have steam friends on that world. That requires steam integration and that requires T-IR be started from the Terraria directory.
Don't bother with launching T-IR with programs it's not at all necessary.
@Chevron_Boy:
T-IR is no longer a part of any single release. There is content from Terraria v1.2.4.1 and v1.3 in T-IR. T-IR does NOT require any particular Terraria release or even that a version of Terraria is installed. It only requires that the person owns Terraria to play.
The past month has been productive (finally). The explosives mechanic is nearly finished. It's pretty sweet I must say. You can set off explosives tiles with regular bombs. In fact, you can chain react explosives of all types. There are budget and premium versions of bombs, dynamite, and explosives now. They vary in their destructive power. There are complementary sticky version for bombs and dynamite. There is a new explosives tile. It does quite a bit more damage and more radius than the normal explosives. there is also a pretty unique explosive that actually places on top of tiles like wire except it's always visible. It chains like all explosives do. Its radius is rather small but it packs a lot of damage. It's primarily a controlled demolition tool. It should allow for rather precise lines, column, and such to be mined our fast.
I finally got around to fix some long outstanding minor bugs like the one mentioned several posts back (the hell background alignment bug). A lot of work has gone into finalizing a lot of loose ends. Hopefully some quality content can be produced going forwards. Then I think T-IR will be worth an official release.