oinet

Although there seems to be no developer pulse here, I thought it's for the best to provide an update. The day after the install, when I had booted the computer again, the application (and system) windows were now dimmed. However, the taskbar and context menus remain non-dimmed.

Application windows not dimmed, and neither is taskbar after clicking.

you misinterpreted that what you saw. Of couse the main-function is called, and linked. Otherwise the binary couldn't be linked at all. Exisitance of main() (or equivalent) is a strict requirement for a executable. A process needs to start at a certain position whose address is in the PE header. main() is then called (or jumped to) by that start routine. Anything can pontentially be happening. How would I know if linker isn't instructed to link in a "debug"/diagnostics main() that does it's own thing...

I just compiled the the example without fopen() in the latest (3 years old now) TDM-GCC which contains gcc/mingw-w64 version 5.1.0. The built executable runs as expected, no problem.

you misinterpreted that what you saw. Of couse the main-function is called, and linked. Otherwise the binary couldn't be linked at all. Exisitance of main() (or equivalent) is a strict requirement for a executable. A process needs to start at a certain position whose address is in the PE header. main() is then called (or jumped to) by that start routine. Anything can pontentially be happening. How would I know if linker isn't instructed to link in a "debug"/diagnostics main() that does it's own thing...

main() not called if not containing call to for example fopen()