>Even a Visual C++ application will almost certainly need the MFC libraries.

Mine don't. :) I got sick of hassling with all the different versions, and requiring my users (in some cases) to make two downloads (one of my app, another of the DLLs if the user didn't have them). So now I statically link in the C++ libs. It adds a few hundred K to the size of the executable, but I feel it's worth it.