cjdelphi:
Why not remove it (as in disable it as an option or something along the lines, default off you have to explicitly enable it somehow) ?
Instead of removing strings, they just have to make about a 1-line change to the library code in free() that has a bug in it. Then some, at least, of the problems will go away.
You potentially still have problems with memory fragmentation, but as some posters have observed, these do not always bite you.