This is a perfectly acceptable solution, although there is a better one yet. What you can do is change both your Relocation RVA and Size to 0, then in your PE Characteristics, set the Relocation Stripped flag. That way, you don't even need the header, and can simply delete the .reloc section's physical data and set its RSize to 0 in the section header. You might even be able to be rid of the section entirely, and wipe the section header out of the PE header, but I have never tested it; I'm always hesitant to delete sections created by the compiler, maybe I'm just too cautious...

I'm not sure if this would cause problems or not, as I'm not entirely sure what the section at 22E000 is for. It certainly could work, as the thing that's causing your exe to not run after you remove the .data section is not related to TLS. Needless to say, I have a different solution than yours; not to say that mine is a better solution, but it is different. The only thing I have against your solution is my general hesitation to copy data to 00'd out sections, as those sections are usually initialized at runtime and data you put there has a tendancy to get overwritten.

This is a good observation... Run with it!

Reread my description of what the .data section is. There are more things relocated in that section that the Relocation table and TLS table.

Regards