Bruce,

au contraire, I removed the first version of Borland C++ compiler I got because it created a 10 meg debug file from a relatively small project. MS C++ debug files were about 500k. This was back in the days of 100-200 meg drives

There is more than just debug info in the .pdb files it's also intermediate compiler output to speed the compile of your code that uses MFC. So you trade disk space for compile speed.

>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)...