New GAC references in Asp.net 2.0 RC1 Apps

[nkoier]

Hello. We just upgraded our local development machines to VS 2005 RC1.
We developed and deployed a web application in Beta2. We are noticing
when we compile our web app in RC1, it is automatically adding a whole
bunch of versioned references to assemblies in the GAC. If I delete
these references and build again they come back. It appears that these
assembly references are being inherited from several other projects
that the web application is referencing even though the web application
does not use these itself directly. This is definately new behavior in
RC1, yet I assume it is supposed to be like that.

Our problem lies in when we deploy to our web server which does not
have most of the assemblies being referenced installed. i.e. Crystal
Reports, DevExpress, etc. This causes the web app to throw an exception
at runtime. If we remove the assembly references from the web.config,
the site works fine. This is the approach we have been taking so far
but it feels more like a bandaid then a cure. I can't seem to find any
documentation or threads regarding this either.

So I guess I have a couple of questions:

1 - Why? What is the reason for automatically copying these references
into the web application and do we HAVE to leave them in there?

2 - What can we do in our situation to avoid these invalid references
short of installing a bunch of stuff on the server that will never get
used?

Thanks!