I would suggest the biggest reason for the memory footprint isn't the CLR or
other DLL's loaded. but rather due to how memory is managed by the CLR and
the garbage collector.

The garbage collector has a behaviour that requires a block of memory to be
allocated (well, technically, a couple of memory blocks) and these memory
blocks will expand depending on the behaviour of your application and how
much garbage is collected. The memory footprint of the application (as
viewed in the task manager, at least) will be larger than an unmanaged
application because of these memory pools allocated by the CLR for providing
memory to the application.

Whilst your application may not be allocating that much memory, to ensure
the memory blocks are not reallocated too frequently to adversely affect an
applications performance it is necessary for a memory block of a certain
size to be allocated.

n!