i recently removed references to msvcrt from a retail dll and saw the image size drop by 24K (mostly imports and such probably... but imports that may require lookups!). in addition to a smaller binary, we will run faster without it. the CRT has a substantial amount of start-up code which is worthwhile for apps, but not for system components. it is a common misconception that MSVCRT.DLL is a "freebie" since it's (probably!) already loaded by the system. this is very wrong. even if MSVCRT is *mapped* by the system, it is not necessarily in memory and will contribute many pages to our already large working set.