Read the analysis of bloat in MSRegclean in Risks 20.37. The article makes an intriguing analogy between code bloat and peacocks' tails. This led me to the book "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley (For non-UK readers this is the link). It was out when I went to the library, but I have one of his other books which also looks interesting. (I wish there was some way of unifying Amazon links so that I didn't have to keep having them in pairs - triples if I included the one in the .de domain! They should unify their affiliates programmes! Or else there should be an easy way of looking at the requesting hostname and determining where it is so that I could generate the URLs on the fly.)