I know it's not fair, and I'm sure that you spent a lot of time doing again and again all the steps to properly compile and use SFML 2
But I can tell you that it works, a lot of people have used SFML 2 for a long time (including me of course) and I would know if there was such a fundamental issue. I can also tell you that there's nothing special to do to use SFML 2.
I have no idea what's wrong, so all I can tell you is to:
1. remove absolutely everything related to all versions of SFML that you have (headers, libs, binaries, ...)
2. get the latest revision of SFML 2
3. open the VC2008 solution file, select your configuration and hit "rebuild all"
4. don't copy SFML headers and libs to your VC++ directories, this is not the clean solution; instead leave the files where they are, and add those headers / libs paths to the VC++ search paths
5. setup a valid SFML 2 sample project and compile it, try static libs first so that you avoid a possible DLL conflict
6. should work