If you start a new standard EXE project and compile it without writing a single line of code but still keep the Form that is created this program will take up approx. 2.5MB of memory... This is unfortunatly something VB does because of the run-time files that is always linked, but that doesn't mean it actually takes up 2.5 MB of your RAM. The run-time library is only loaded once into the physical memory regardless of how many VB programs you're running, but each process will add this memory to the virtual memory space. So you shouldn't worry about it .