Intelli-sense - I may lack both, so I grovel. (offers no vars / arduino functions etc...)

This is a common problem when people just declare their global variables in a .h file and include it from multiple .cpp files – you have to use a extern declaration (in header) and definition (in cpp file) pattern to do global variable sharing correctly. This has been discussed a lot of times in the forum already, see e.g.

If you still have problems, post the complete source code with error message.