> Further, from the testing I did, there is no noticeable impact on my C application which reads from argv- the C runtime seems to handle this transparently.

I disagree with your assessment here.

First, the C runtime doesn't have the "part of the system" feel that it does in the Unix world. There is a CRT in the OS, but most programs link to the CRT that ships with visual studio, so it could theoretically change version to version, compiler to compiler.

Apart from that a Win32 application could choose to bypass the CRT's entry point and use WinMain(). Many do. Even if it does use CRT main there is GetCommandLine() to reach the raw command line underneath. Shell32 even has a function CommandLineToArgvW which behaves differently from CRT. Those two are different from parsing done by cmd.exe. There is a lot of ambiguity is my point.