ok, Tortoise installed ok and on the right-click menus as expected.

Created myself an osmarender source folder Documents\OSM\Osmarender\source, right clicked on it and selected SVN checkout. Tortoise comes up and I've pasted http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/osmarender/ which is off the howto page. Not sure how much of this I'll need. 4.96meg downloaded.

Saved osm-map-features-z17.xml and osmarender.xsl to my osm folder off the howto wiki.

Getting the data. I'm going to use JOSM to select a very small area and save it as data.osm.

Now to render it. I'm going to use xmlstarlet because I seem to remember it was the only one I could get to work.

Downloaded the zip file and unpacked to Documents\OSM\Osmarender\xmlstarlet-1.0.1

Now to create myself a text file in notepad where I can experiment with the command lines and paste them into the Run window.

Well that was easy! These 2 commands do it.
cd Documents\OSM\Osmarender
xmlstarlet-1.0.1\xml tr osmarender.xsl osm-map-features-z17.xml > map.svg

I used Opera to view the map.svg file and there it was.

Now to install inkscape to be able to edit it.

I've done this before on an old PC and I'm about to try again on a different one. I remember it taking ages last time!

I'm not developer, although I used to program Access 2 professionally many years ago, so much of the modern stuff is lost on me!

First off, the Osmarender wiki page osm.wiki/Osmarender

then to the howto and then to getting the source
osm.wiki/Getting_The_Source

The source is held in a repository called the subversion system, and I need to get a tool to extract it. My son had installed one called Tortoise on my last PC, so I'm just off to get it as it's referenced on the wiki page too.

Downloaded the installed from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads and run it. Need to reboot so BRB!