Fortunately, I then decided to flip through the Talk page for the Valve Developer Wiki page on Compiling with VS2008, and found out that it was in fact a reported bug. Soon, the article was updated to include a fix for it.

However, I still couldn’t successfully build the object,  as I was getting Linker errors. I then realized that the Wiki article had left out a minor detail – when modifying the properties for the solutions, you had to configure them for Release configuration, not the default active Debug mode. You also then need to set the project to build for Release.

Finally, I ran into one final error. During the output phase, I got the error “PRJ0007 : Could not create output directory …” a quick search through the internet and I found this . The solution was correct, but I was still getting the error “PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from “Copying to destination folder”" (of course, there were a few more details given, but I forgot exactly what they were). I went to check to see what’s up with the directory it’s trying to copy to. The permissions were correct, path was correct… then I realized that somehow, due to the initial error, a bin file had been created (rather than a bin folder). This seemed to prevent the compiler from creating a new bin folder, so I deleted the file and true enough, I finally got it to build correctly.