Question about chacl

[JeffreyC]

I'm trying to set permissions for a projectd using chacl and am unable
because the initial cvs checkout is apparently not work. We have a
large repository with many projects in place, and I've been using cvs
checkout for months now, usually for deployments and tagging; but for
some reason in this instance it is not working. Here's what I'm doing:

       cvs checkout -r HEAD ProjectName
      (This works fine)

       cvs chacl -R chacl cvsadmin:r ProjectName

      (This results in the following message:)
      cvs chacl: in directory .:
      cvs [chacl aborted]: there is no version here; do 'cvs checkout'
first

I can't even perform a simple listing of permissions using lacl on
that project -- that command returns the same message. Any suggestions
would be much appreciated. Some details:

OS: Windows Server 2003
CVS: CVSNT 2.0.38