Understanding how CVS works is easy once you've got all the software setup. You'll find a lot of HOWTO's concerning this, but most of them (also) have Linux in mind. And that can get very confusing from time to time. To get started you need to have three applications: a CVS client to upload and download the files, a SSH client for the secure connection and preferably something to check out the differences between versions of files.
Before you start installing the needed applications, you have to make a few preparations:
If you are a developer using a project on SourceForge, then you need to know your SourceForge username, your password and the exact projectname of the project on SourceForge where you are a developer.
WinCVS needs a place to store the files you're going to check-out and edit. This is called the CVSRoot directory. You can use any (empty) directory on your pc for that. I used d:\cvsroot\ as root-directory
Create a root-directory, i.e. d:\cvsroot\