Cygwin is a wonderful system for running UNIXy/Linuxy software on Windows. While there are many caveats it does work quite well for at least basic tasks and it has been extended so far as to be able to run X/Windows therefore KDE and Gnome all within Windows. Nifty. Anyway, while trying to get it set up for running a Subversion server I was having problems getting it to work as advertised. What I ended up having to do was tell the svnserve program to run as a service/daemon in the foreground rather than splitting off to run in the background as normal, e.g.:

$ cygrunsrv.exe --install svnserve --disp "CYGWIN svnserve" --path /bin/svnserve --args "--daemon --foreground --root=/home/svn"