I was following this and getting the following when trying to start the service: "The service is not responding to the control function. More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 2186." Looks like this was because I did not follow the advice in the article and choose install without spaces. So, I chose: C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin In this case you need to use escape characters to specify the service setup, namely: sc create svnserver binPath= "\"C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\svnserve.exe\" --service -r c:\svn\repository" displayname= Subversion depend= Tcpip start= auto