>George,
>
>>>Yeah, I've noticed some of that. Perhaps that's the legacy of creating a fast compiler at (maybe) the expense of a careful compiler. I've also heard arguments made (that I agree with) calling for a more compact version of the VFP runtimes that tosses out all backward-compatible stuff (you know, the stuff that when you look in the Help file says "For backward compatibility, use XXXX instead").
>>
>>Well, excluding the debug info can reduce the size. I haven't seen anything official, but my experience is that it's about 25%.
>
>This disables the error handler to determine on which program line the error occured. This is the main reason why I have debug info include in my apps.

Why not one EXE with the symbols included for debugging, and another without for distribution? MS does something similar with its products. The MSDN Universal comes with Debug/Checked Builds.