I found this very interesting blog entry by Jim Beveridge about archiving an object library (.lib, or .a for unix-heads) on various flavors of Visual Studio 2005 and later...
http://qualapps.blogspot.com/2007/12/winsxs-breaks-old-debug-libraries.html so anything we ship as a lib (which isn't a dynamic library) looks to be next to useless once we adopt a modern version of VC. Bill
