How do I specify that I don't want the various libraries compiled into my exe so that the user is required to provide the VC7 runtimes required?  The idea is to make the exe smaller.

Things you don't want?  Under Linker goto Optimizations.  For References set it to Eliminate Unreferenced Data (/OPT:REF).  I think that's what you want

On the C/C++ or code generation page you can select what run-time library to use. "DLL" means that the user provides the DLLs. On the general page you can select whether to use MFC or ATL from a DLL, statically or not at all.