When I try to connect using Tortoise to my SVN server using:

svn://localhost/

Tortoise tells me: "Can't connect to host 'localhost'. No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it."

How can I fix this?

I am trying to set up a subversion server on my local PC for personal use. I am running Windows Vista, with SlikSVN and TortoiseSVN installed. I previously had everything working correctly, but I found that I couldn't merge(!), apparently due to a version mismatch between the SVN client and server. Anyway... I now have the following setup:

I created a repository using svnadmin create; it resides at C:\svnGrove

C:\svnGrove\conf\svnserve.conf (# comments omitted):

[general]
anon-access=read
auth-access=write
password-db=passwd
#authz-db=authz
realm=svnGrove

C:\svnGrove\conf\passwd:

[users]
myname=mypass

My Subversion Server service is pointed to:

C:\Program Files\SlikSvn\bin\svnserve.exe --service -r C:\svnGrove

It shows the TCP/IP service as a dependency. I have also tried running svnserve from the command line, with similar results.

The below is provided by the 'about' option in TortoiseSVN:

TortoiseSVN 1.6.10, Build 19898 - 32 Bit , 2010/07/16 15:46:08
Subversion 1.6.12, 
apr 1.3.8
apr-utils 1.3.9
neon 0.29.3
OpenSSL 0.9.8o 01 Jun 2010
zlib 1.2.3

The following is from svn --version on the command line (not sure why it says CollabNet, CollabNet was the previous SVN binary that I had set up. The uninstaller failed to remove everything gracefully):

svn, version 1.6.12 (SlikSvn/1.6.12) WIN32
   compiled Jun 22 2010, 20:45:29

Copyright (C) 2000-2009 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_neon : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using Neon.
  - handles 'http' scheme
  - handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
  - with Cyrus SASL authentication
  - handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
  - handles 'file' scheme
* ra_serf : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using serf.
  - handles 'http' scheme
  - handles 'https' scheme

I disabled my Windows Firewall and CA Internet Security, without success in resolving the issue.

Edit

The old version of svnserve was still set up as a service after the uninstall, pointed to this path:

C:\Program Files\Subversion\svn-win32-1.4.6\bin

I edited the registry key for the service to point to the new path (shown above). Whether I run svnserve as a service, or using -d, I do not see an entry for that port number in the listing generated by netstat -anp tcp.