Yes, I found them in the right spot last night and double checked them today. The header files seem to be just fine, I can open them with dev-cpp and look at them. I used that wiki page when I was getting things set up and I can say that the wiki you have there is very detailed and helpful.
I suspect I'm missing something that is simple in nature.
(I attempted a workaround by taking the ref_gl.dll from release 2.0 RC6 and renaming it to ref_gl32d.dll. The game would work fine until I tried to load the first mission map then all i would get is a black screen with the crosshair cursor. This leads me to believe that I have to fully rebuild that dll.)
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lol, it was simple. Thanks for the tip too, it turns out that when the SDL packs were installed the header files were not copied into the main include directory. After I did that manually, the dll was built successfully. I'm so glad that I am learning to check my assumptions hehe.