A Not-Called Function Can Cause a 5X Slowdown
Windows has a real problem with huge monolithic dlls that inexplicably pull in other huge monolithic dlls.  Especially when each dllmain() has its own weird side effects.  It leads to bizarre behavior all the time such as this.<p>The weirdest thing that ever happened to me was when Visual Studio 2012 hung in the installer.  After debugging with an older VS, it turned out the installer rendered some progress bar with Silverlight, which was hung on audio initialization, which was hung on a file system driver, which was hung on a shitty Apple-provided HFS driver.  Uninstalling HFS fixed the installer.<p>Why does an installer even need audio when it never played sound?  Because Microsoft dependencies are fucked.