You should directly start with SFML 2.0. Yes there are differences and yes the SFML 2.0 are not all online yet, but if you start with 1.6 you miss out on quite a few nice features and once you want to switch you will have to relearn everything again.
If really, really, really don't want to use SFML 2.0, then you should recompile SFML 1.6. Getting an old compiler, just to get some very old library to work is the wrong way to go about.