After following every document I could find on CVS, I still was basically no where.

I finnally decided that there was some problem with my SourceForge account.

There were three potential issues and being a poor scientist, I changed them all at once so I am not sure which one, two , or if all three issues corrected the problem. All I know is that I configured my CVS client to work both on my NT workstation in my office, and on my 98 machine at home.
The issues were:

1. My NT user name was "ewoolhis" and my SourceForge username was "woolhiser" and I could not set USERNAME=woolhiser on my NT machine, as it was always set to "ewoolhis" everytime I opened a new shell.
2. I had monkied around with my passwd on the SourceForge account so it is possible that my passwords are out of sync somewhere.
3. I noticed that "woolhiser" is nine letters rather than eight.

I fixed all three issues by creating a new SourceForge account called "ewoolhis". And this account works just fine. The first issue probably has no effect as setting USERNAME was not mentioned in the WinCVS documents, and I still cannot get "woolhiser" to work from my Win 98 machine at home where I can in fact set USERNAME=woolhiser.

My recomendation is that if you have tried everything else, you may want to get an eight letter SourceForge account and I also recommend keeping it to small letters. (I have read some forum posts that this can influence CVS.)