It's been a while since I tried to access our company's CVS from home. The CVS root that I had configured long ago did no longer work. I use external ssh implementation with putty's plink.exe. The cvsroot was of the form :ext:putty-session-name:/path I took me some trial and error to see that it now only works in Idea if you specify a user like :ext:stephen@putty-session-name:/path This should not be necessary as the user is stored in my putty session. Command line CVS also does work with the shorter form of the CVSROOT. The "Edit by Field" also no longer accepts empty user field. Please change this back!