At the request of a reader I put together a guide on how to build your SFML 1.6 project in release mode, then how to package it for distribution.
It’s part of the main tutorial series, but can be accessed directly here. If you are looking into how to distribute a release version of your SFML game, be sure to check it out
In doing so, I ran into a NASTY C++ related problem, which I will mention in a post shortly!