I finally got around to testing the impact of statically linking the C++ runtime for jvm.dll. It's only about 1.5% footprint_real on Noop - pretty unspectacular. It also saves about 500k of on-disk JRE footprint and, as near as I can estimate, about 130k of download size.
Although the above result is not that great, it's something, and it's an easy, low risk change, so we'll proceed with it.