I have a sneaky suspicion you're right, windows generally assumes any 'shared' code will be in DLLs and is optimized around ensuring they are shared as much as

I have a sneaky suspicion you're right, windows generally assumes any 'shared' code will be in DLLs and is optimized around ensuring they are shared as much as possible in memory. It's likely that if the tests were in a DLL vs. the EXE then windows would just share the CFG page for that DLL read only between all the processes and call it done.