I followed the Comiling using VMware tutorial on this board. I put in the first part into the command prompt (eterm) and I get a "cvs checkout: warning: failed to open /home/user/.cvspass for reading: No such file or directory"
But then it procedes to download the CVS as regular.
This is normal if you run cvs for the first time.
On the other problem, if you have personal firewall, disable it, also, you can try to set VMWare to "host only". If you used to get a connection and now you don't , reset VMWare.
and you don't use internet explorer, just use windows explorer. You can do a search for the computer "debian", this is sometimes faster.