Yes you're correct, and I suspected this so I went back to basics building a project from ground zero.  I in fact had a 
couple of issues.  The first was that my editor of choice is eclipse and I'd previously been developing known working 
code for a different target and using CLI to make.  The QNX environment was picking up the project settings and 
confusing itself.  Remedy, remove the project from my non-QNX Eclipse workspace and lose the .cproject files.  This 
known working code has well defined partitions, but there must have been something under the bonnet that was confusing 
the IDE.  What concerned me more was that I had a simple device header, no includes, only typedefs, that was throwing 
the error so god only knows what was going on here.

Thanks for the feedback anyhow