MSVC sucks, too ... that's the real problem. Look at this: "Catastrophic failure". It doesn't get much worse than that. Of course, I shouldn't be editing the .rc files by hand ... but I wouldn't need to if there were ways to selectively include controls. But nope. So instead I end up modifying shit through the IDE and then taking diffs of the resultant .rc files to see what the hell MSVC is trying to do. Grrrr. I need to write a good Java client instead and distribute that with a JRE.
Update: Figured it out. The resource compiler has its own set of preprocessor definitions separate from the C++ preprocessor. Duh! *rolls eyes*