Collabnet is the official home of SVN and I could download both a server and client from there. I wanted to run both server and client on the same system. http://subversion.open.collab.net/ Collabnet seems to offer a 1.6.6 version server, but only a 1.5.5 version of windows client. This turned into an issue later.
Installing the server was easy. Since I wasn't currently running a web server on the system, I installed the bundled apache along with the server. I'm thinking of removing that later for security purposes.
Then I created a repository:
svnadmin create \Users\bruce\baserepository
The netbeans source import option shows up when right clicking a project. Choose the Versioning->Subversion option. The first time you import, the system pops up a request to set up your integration. The two options it gives are using an auto downloaded svn client or your own svn command line version. The autodownload option specifically calls out 64 bit client as unsupported... thus the download of the client from collabnet.
I installed the collabnet 1.5.5 client on my system. The collabnet site gives some intstructions :
http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/netbeans/index.html. Unfortunately, when I restarted netbeans and tried to import files into the repository I made, it kept giving the same error:
svn: Expected FS format between '1' and '3'; found format '4'
Discussion groups revealed that this was due to the 1.5.5 and the 1.6.6 server using conflicting formats. Two options where to use a compatibility flag when creating a repository with SVNadmin or download a new windows build from sliksvn: http://www.sliksvn.com/en/download which distributes the latest builds of the client for 64 bit windows. Did the latter, installed it, restarted netbeans and voila; working import.
The other blogger was right: very slick integration between netbeans and svn.
Back to coding now, but thought that hint might help some people.