Huge static libraries in Visual Studio 2005

I build Ogre + dependencies into a static lib in Visual Studio 2005. The resulting .lib was 1,445,853,944 bytes. In fact I had to use a special flag /expectedoutputsize:50000000 or else the compiler incorrectly reported “LNK1106: invalid file or disk full: cannot seek to 0x76364” It also took minutes to link.

The same thing, built as a DLL was 7,921,664 bytes and the lib was 2,983,094 bytes. It took less than a second to link.