title: What is the smallest possible Windows (PE) executable?
body: <p>As a precursor to writing a compiler I'm trying to understand the Windows (32-bit) Portable Executable format. In particular I'd like to see an example of a bare-bones executable which does nothing except load correctly, run and exit.</p>
  
  <p>I've tried writing and compiling a simple C main function which does nothing but the resulting .exe is ~22KB and contains many imports from KERNEL32.DLL (presumably used by LIBC to set up environment, heaps etc.). Even the DOS Header could probably be smaller (it currently prints the default 'This program cannot be run in DOS mode').</p>
  
  <p>What is the structure of the smallest possible Windows 32-bit executable?</p>