.gitignore not

I'm running on Windows, using msysgit.  I have some files that were supposed to be 
symbolic links, but don't come out that way.  I see them as plain files containing a 
relative name of another file.  To make things work, I copied the actual file over the 
would-be link.  I don't want to check in that change.

I set up a .gitignore, and it works for the directory in general, but three files that 
were symbolic links it keeps finding anyway: deleted symlink (for those that were 
directories) and binary files don't match (for a file).  Even though those are under the 
directory I excluded with the .gitignore, it reports those anyway.

How do I tell my local copy of git to really ignore those?  I don't want to stage it by 
accident.

—John