Okay, so I actually got it to work; the issue was that I was linking in window before graphics and in reading other posts about linking, that seems to be a common mistake.
However..... now the executable just stops working as soon as the program starts. Any idea what that might be caused by? For what it's worth, I also removed the redundant #define SFML_STATIC. If this is of any help, here's what the dialog spits out in Additional Details:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: main.exe
Application Version: 0.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 0326f0d0
Fault Module Name: main.exe
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 0326f0d0
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0005c57f
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
EDIT (7/17/14):
So I went ahead and tried running it through gdb to see what the issue was; it spat out this for me:
Starting program: Z:\sfml_dev/main.exe
[New Thread 6384.0xff8]
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0045c56b in sf::String::String(char const*, std::locale const&) ()
It appears (based also on my research into similar issues with related threads) that the issue is with the string that's being passed into the RenderWindow constructor; I tried adjusting the above code to have a declared sf::String that's initialized as sf::String title("My window"); that's then passed into the constructor based on someone who said that had fixed it for them, but I still get the same crash with similar gdb output. My GCC version is 4.8.1, and I'm running static libraries that I have compiled myself from SFML with that compiler. Hope this may be prove useful in determining the problem a bit more.
Thanks so much for your time and help!
Best,
Colton