I uninstalled everything and started again and cvs worked, I managed to load up the db and everything. I did it from the command line following these instructions
http://www.eqemulator.net/wiki/wikka...kka=ws1129r222 and it whizzed through in no time.
I still get the "can't find python" message when I start wincvs but I believe that is optional.
Now I've done everything but am unable to start the server which I guess is normal and I've either missed a bit out or there is some setting I've got wrong
so I'm happy