What's the costs of unused assembly references?

Question

I was wondering what the various costs of referencing assemblies in a .NET solution are. I\'m interested in both technical and organizational costs.

Some examples:

Answer 1

In my opinion the organizational overhead for me (and my co-workers) to even think about unused references (why do we need XML here?) is enough motivation to remove them. Consequently, I have never considered the impact on deployment or performance.