In general I agree, but there may be cases where some bloat is justified (like getting readable callstacks on a crash, which may require at least some amount of

In general I agree, but there may be cases where some bloat is justified (like getting readable callstacks on a crash, which may require at least some amount of debug information). Having said that, 3.5 Mbytes for a "do-nothing" exe is quite crazy though and should have been addressed long ago. I would expect somewhere between 4 and (to be generous) 64 KBytes.