3 megs does seem a lot of memory for a messagebox, even under Windows...

Some of the handles you mentioned might be for things like the standard input/output that are set up in system.pas. I'll investigate that later today, since it's the kind of thing I enjoy.

I've had the same problem as you trying to get the RTL to compile. If you check in dcc32.exe, you'll see strings for various units - I think it's embedded into the compiler. If that's the case then things will get very annoying.

I think I might post on one of the Borland newsgroups later to see what the concensus is. It seems stupid to supply the RTL source but not let you change it!

Btw, what Delphi version and do you have the RTL source code?