Nigel,

I installed TortoiseSVN today (v1.5.2), as you recommended a while back. I was waiting for a couple point releases after the major 1.5 release.

Very professional installer.

Any insight/advice on how I should set it up?

No real advice, the main thing is just to start. Create a repository somewhere, and start checking stuff into it and out of it.

If you start out running svn in a serverless mode, then you refer to the SVN repository using file:/// URLs and the SVN client knows that means to open the repository itself and get and put the files from there.

What you may want to do eventually is start using svn to share and version-controlled content you send between your host system and your VMs (I do that a lot), in which case you'll have an HTTP server running mod_dav_svn in your host (easy to do with things like xampp or cygwin, preferably xampp). You can still keep exactly the same repository if you do later decide to do this, though, and all that really changes is that when you add it, you can start using http:// or https:// URLs to point at the server instead of a file:/// URL to point at the raw location of the repository.

There's a lot of things you can do to "properly" organize a repository, but those are all just conventions rather than rules, and you can grow into them over time as you learn what svn can do for you. You really can't do things seriously "wrong" - if you later want to re-organize things, you can do that (and because everything is change-controlled in the repository itself, you can back out any mistakes by reverting to an earlier version of things).