Tom,
Thanks for responding. I went with CVSNT because TortoiseCVS is built
on it as well (feature comparison breakdown here:
http://www.cvsnt.com/cvspro/compare.htm).
I actually found that it was not my CVS installation on X, but rather
some sort of issue with the Tortoise client (which I had originally
tried with the standard CVS that is so common and could not get to work
either). I have now found success with *both* the eclipse CVS tool as
well as a Java frontend called SmartCVS, which I like a lot
(http://www.smartcvs.com)