I've decided to try building the VM, initially on Win32.  If this is a 
fool's errand, could someone let me know?  I notice the latest released 
build is about 9 months old, and there are various warnings suggesting 
there might be some reasons for that.  Any other pointers would be great.

Several people pointed out that the newer Unix VM I just started using 
writes an extra 512 bytes at the start of the image, so I can no longer 
open it with my 3.1alpha windows VM.  There were also several suggestions 
for chopping that off, but since I switch back and forth all the time, 
since I'm not sure if the chopped off image can be read back in the new VM, 
and since in general it seems time I learned to make a VM, I thought I'd try.

The rest of this messages gives specifics of the contradictory information 
I've gleaned:
* Recent traffic on the list suggesting VMMaker + sourceforge works, with 
either gcc or MSVC.  It sounds as if a naive approach will do.
* SourceForgePlatformStatus on the Swiki, updated 20 Jan 2002, says the 
source forge version tagged
stable-win32-3-1-3 works with limitations, and requires a now obsolete 
version of VMMaker
* "Building a Windows VM" (1787 on swiki), from May 2001, says to use the 
version of source files there (3.1alpha) along with a particular version of 
gcc tools
* VMMaker version 5 was released a few days ago.  The comment says its 
intended for a 3.2 image, so I'm unclear what happens if I try this with a 
3.3alpha image.

There are also, of course, a variety of images to choose from.  I have 
MSVC, but could also get gcc if necessary.  Since I read a note by Andreas 
that MSVC is better for debugging, and since I already have it, I'm 
inclined to try it first.

Finally, while trying to get the source tree from source forge, I specified 
squeak as the project.  This got what seemed to be a win32 specific 
directory tree, along with lots of warnings like:
cvs checkout: in directory squeak:
cvs checkout: ignoring CVS/Root because it specifies a non-existent 
repository /home/andreasr/CVSRoot

I subsequently tried "platforms" as the project, and I think this got the 
right stuff.  But I wonder what that other stuff is.