Another Static page question

ok I have scoured the forums in here and in wordpress.com for this issue I have. I have wp installed in its own directory in my website. When I go to system404.net I get my homepage(static), when I go to system404.net/wordpress I get my first wp page(dynamic). Now I want to update my site and I want my static page to display dynamic content… namely I want it to call up my themes and get the css, the header, latest post, sidebar and footer.

So my first solution came in the form of BigSquareDot This worked great in that it actually got my latest post and displayed it on my root site. Beautiful. When I tried to use this to sorta get the other content(like header, sidebar and footer) I was getting nowhere.

So then I scoured once again the wordpress docs. I followed exactly everything that doc said but I always end up with this:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_header() in /home/system40/public_html/sandbox/index.php

I’ve tried adding every possible url in

define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
require(‘./wp-blog-header.php‘);
get_header();

nothing. So I gave up on that and decided I wasn’t going to have my main(splash)page on the root of my site instead I was going to follow Turbocharged’s advice and have the page rest inside the wordpress directory but have a redirect so people going to system404.net would end up in system404.net/wordpress/home(as ugly as that might look)

But I still couldn’t get that to work. I wasn’t being redirected to where I wanted, and it gave me an error saying something towards the effect of : that url doesn’t exist.

in short, is it possible to have a page in the root dir(even though wp is installed in it’s own dir)that gets all that wp info (header,sidebar,footer) and displays it on that said root page? Philip Arthur Moore(on Squaredotcom) had a loop that actually called all the database info to get latest post(sorry if i’m killing the terminology, I’m not a programmer, just an artist.GASP!)I just couldn’t get it to call anything else.

The other solution, and the most convenient, is the on from Turbocharged and educated networks. If i’m not mistaken this solution means I can edit my pages inside the wp-admin
and I can keep everything neatly organized in one dir, the only problem is that the url would point to system404.net/wordpress/home

I don’t want to change wp to the root because…well it just seems like a lot of unnecessary work over something that’s should be just a few lines of code.

I’m really stumped, any help would be greatly appreciated.