>They are not necessary to tinker in VC, the CodeView debugger uses them if you want to trace into the MFC source code while debugging.

Sounds good -- boy, that's awful lot of debugger stuff, I used to do Borland C++ a few years ago, and never had anything like that...have you checked what's in your System dir with the PDB extension (if you have them installed)? They're huge (collectively)...