GLEW can be statically linked to your project so that you don’t need DLLs. Simply define GLEW_STATIC before including glew.h, and link to glew32s.lib. On a Windows PC, you NEED to use function pointers, which can be easily acquired using an extension loading library. As Zyx said, everything not included in opengl 1.1 on Windows has to be acquired via extension loading.
Included in the glew binaries is a utility program called glewinfo.exe. This will generate a text file that shows which functions pointers are accessible on your 2.1 implementation. It is entirely possible that your driver supports 2.1, but doesn’t support glGenBuffers (I have some old ATI OpenGL 2.0 drivers that do just that), but that is bug in the implementation which can only be fixed by updated drivers.