Of course it is... maybe my hard drive is faster than I think and more % of time goes to code execution than for you?
That's amusingly stupid piece of code, lol.
No way. I even disassembled my program and it is certainly calling the correct (non-debug) CRT functions from msvcrt.dll.
I think all of this is more of a personal taste (and time). I like ultra-high performance and I like to do it in C rather than in Assembly. I hope you don't mind if I continue writing WinAPI code?