A couple of months ago, I was given a copy of MS Visual C 7 (by which I mean ‘Visual C++.net 2003 Standard Edition, which includes version 7 of the Microsoft C/C++ compiler’), on the grounds that if I started compiling PuTTY with it then its standard library would fix a command-line parsing bug in the current release of the tools.

Today I finally got round to installing it, and was rather annoyed to find that the Standard Edition only contains a non-optimising C compiler. As a result all the PuTTY binaries spontaneously bloated by about 50%, and were presumably proportionately slower as well although I wasn't easily able to test this. This seemed like a completely unacceptable price to pay for fixing one small and not terribly serious bug, so it appeared that the very kind person who donated me VC7 had wasted his money. Which was pretty annoying.

Just out of curiosity, I googled to see if I could find out the relative price points of VC7 Standard and VC7 Thenextoneup. I didn't actually manage to find that information, but among the pages I did find was the Amazon product page for VC7 Standard. On that page was a review from a customer who had found exactly the same thing as me – but who also knew how to solve it: download the free-of-charge Visual C++ Toolkit from MS's web site, which contains the full optimising compiler. And indeed, downloading this and installing it alongside VC7 proper (VC7 is still required, since it provides supplementary stuff such as the make utility) appears to have solved my problem: the binaries are all back to their normal size.

It seems very odd that the free download should contain the optimising compiler but that the cheap VC7 Standard should not. I don't think it would have occurred to me to even try that, if I hadn't been tipped off by the Amazon customer review.

So hooray for Amazon! And *boggle* to MS, but that's nothing new.