Tiny PE

Source
Creating the smallest possible PE executableThis work was inspired by the Tiny PE challenge by Gil Dabah. The object of the challenge was to write the smallest PE file that downloads a file from the Internet and executes it.
In the process of writing increasingly smaller PE files for the challenge I learned a lot of interesting details about the PE file format and the Windows loader. The goal of this document is to preserve this knowledge for future reference. In this, I have followed the example of the famous Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux.
SummaryIf you are too busy to read the entire page, here is a summary of the results:

• Smallest possible PE file: 97 bytes
• Smallest possible PE file on Windows 2000: 133 bytes
• Smallest PE file that downloads a file over WebDAV and executes it: 133 bytes

The files above are the smallest possible PE files due to requirements of the PE file format and cannot be improved further. Take this as a challenge if you wish ;-)
UPDATE: Many before me had made similar claims and just like them I turned out to be wrong. Thanks to Peter Ferrie for pointing out that you can remove the last field from the 137 byte file and bring the file size down to 133 bytes.
You can also download an archive with all source code and executables from this page:

• tinype.zip (GPG .sig)

For details about how these results were achieved, read below.
Smallest possible PE file
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