0xCC is INT3 edcba; what is that? it generates a 'debug exception' Eh, I was close enough edbca; so, in other words, it should never be executed and if it is executed it'll generate that 'debug exception'? * siz still wonders how the CISC processor deciphers variable-length instructions ... possibly with a table/grammar of sorts? Make sure to align your data sections too, siz, that's much more critical than text sections Decoding x86 is a horrible mess for processors so, the .text section contains references to the .data section ... we were just going to combine the .data sections and update the relative references to the .data section based on where symbols exist in the combined section ... and based on the relocation table in the individual COFF files? I meant your data section could use padding to be 16 bytes aligned ( at least ) too from our understanding, the relocation table points to each instruction that needs to be updated as required by a simple/complex relocation? aah, ok ...