VS8 executable size increase?

I don't have VC8 but if I had to make a guess...

There might be changes in the CRT which make it larger than previous versions. Can you try checking CRT size?

Oh also I recall something about sinle-threaded libraries being removed. So that could be it. Try compiling on VC7.1 with multi-threaded libs and compare.

Are you sure it couldn't be CRT changes? I mean...the CRT definatly changes each time. And it definatly takes up a different amount of space.

Even if you aren't changing your function calls, you might be suprised how much of the CRT gets into your app. Just by trimming the CRT off my apps I can save about 40kb.

Note: That 40kb save doesn't means "Oh the numbers match! That must be it." The change between the VC7.1 CRT and the VC8 CRT has no relation to the orional CRT size. It just happens to be a coincidence.

Likely the problem is that you didn't disable all the new security checks, so the generated code is littered with all kinds of error checks that don't need to be there if the code works, but were put there so that when your program breaks it will be more obvious what happened and why MS isn't to blame.