Visual Studio 6 and the Little Lost STDLIB

I considered putting "Newbie Help!" as the subject... but I resisted... solely because I really do need help on this

I'm vaguely familiar with C, but I'm by no stretch of the imagination a C programmer. I have a Perl module, however, which has C code that needs compiled before it can be installed. Here's the whole story:

I am trying to implement dbExperts PostgreSQL on our Windoze platforms. The pgsql install is clean and solid, but the creation of the perl module is not. There is a readme.win32 file that perports to give step by step instructions for compiling the module on Windows (it's meant for Linux) but we hit a snag....

Visual Studio 6.0 can't seem to find its own standard library files

We (we is me and the nice IT guru who had a C compiler and let me waste an hour of his time messing with it) went through a series of steps whereby we copied all of the std library files it was looking for into the current working directory and changed all of the:

to:

lines in the postgres source code. This worked ok for the pgsql source code files, but then the "include"d files started blowing up when they tried to find their own includes....

I suppose then the question is this. If I run (the actual pathnames are made up... I can't remember what they really were):

What on earth can I do about nmake or the VS6 compiler or whatever not finding its own standard library?? Perhaps I need to run nmake from a specific location? This all just seems very odd to me...

In other news, I'm buying my own laptop so I can try this out at home on my own... so once that arrives I'll be able to give actual paths and such. If the information here now is too sparse or too confusing, just slap me around a bit while we wait until I post the details from my own trials

Visual Studio installs a batch file named vcvars32.bat on the system that needs to be run in the same command window session in which you are building. It sets up all of the environment variables that VC++ needs. Mine is in c:\, but I don't remember if it is there by default or if I put it there.

Heh... that would explain a lot....

Alrighty, thanks for that mate - I'm going to try and give it another go and see if it all works out.