Wow. Interpreting this under the "hello world is often a demonstration of a particular point" rubric ( http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/02/hello-world-an-instan... ) it looks like Petzoid was trying to demonstrate that a mere finite amount of code could launch a Window API client. Large was, of course, undesirable- but he was trying to see if the API costs were even bounded.