All right, so i select "Build / Publish Website", choose my output directory

Checking the "Output" tab, I see:

Pre-compiling Web Site

Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/App_Code/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/backup/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/design/master/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/design/includes/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/ScriptLibrary/Debug/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/ScriptLibrary/Release/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/sections/articles/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/sections/classified/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/sections/content/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/sections/forums/modules/'.
Building directory '/TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)/sections/forums/'.

Pre-compilation Complete
------ Publish started: Project: C:\Projects\TI - Version 5.0 (Atlas)\, Configuration: Debug .NET ------
========== Build: 1 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========
========== Publish: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

 

And yet, "c:\Projects\!Staging" is bone dry empty.......  

any ideas on what I could look into to get this feature working?

I am not sure. Look at this walkthrough:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1y1404zt.aspx

Also, this is just a guess, maybe Visual Studio doesn't like the "!" in the path.

Yeah, the "!" is a good guess, but it doesn't matter, as i use the same directory on my work install and it works fine....   and i've compared what settings i could between the two installs and the only difference is that at work I use IIS and here at home i use the built in web server, but the article you linked to above, and everything else i've ever seen, makes no mention that this is a problem

It's like the step of copying the precompiled files to the target directory simply isn't firing... to check this i just put a file in the target directory and it should have been deleted as the "Publish" option does this:

Caution
All data in the target folder and its subfolders will be deleted. Make sure that you do not type the name of a folder that contains data or contains subfolders with data

oops, let me back up a step...  Studio did indeed warn me: "All files in publish directory will be deleted, continue" with a yes/no dialog...  answering "yes" did indeed delete the little test file i put there, but it still did not put published files in the folder  :-(

What kind of project are you working with? File System, IIS, or FTP?

I have a similar issue. In my problem, VS did not even warn me. I'm using File System. The output location is a shared folder on the IIS server that I mapped to my computer. Help is appreciated.

Everytime when I tried to publish, I would see a publish failed at the bottom.

I am having this exact same problem, I am  publishing to a unc share however.

It seems like not very many people have this problem else someone may have replied to this question. What I ended up in doing is manually copy the files over to the shared drive that I already mapped to my desktop. The problem comes when I can't map the shared drive. I may have to use FTP but I prefer to have the feature in VS to work like it was made for.