Installing and upgrading help

hmm, I've had days like that, too...

I've been using moodle for a long time and thought cvs made a lot of sense, so I used cvs to install moodle at the document root of our school's website.  All went well and when I pointed my browser to it's url the (now familiar) installation page was displayed.  I chose my language and it discovered that our server met all of its basic requirements, but on the following page after I (correctly, I might add) filled in the site URL and the directories for moodle's installation and its data (heck, I even left off any trailing /'s like it asked me to) my browser spun for much too long and reported that the URL didn't seem correct.

Anyone out there know what could be going on?

thanks in advance,
steve