this should be a simple question,
is the first line of code in setup() of my sketch the code that gets executed when the Arduino board gets powered up? is there anything that runs before that (introduced by the compiler etc)?
There is an init() in the core that does some preliminary configuration and initialization.
And before that, there's the pre-main stuff, and before that, there's the bootloader.
See detailed analysis here: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1283329855
great! thank you for the reference. it was what i wanted to know from this post.