I was still unable to logon to CVS. I was getting error messages saying that the CVS root was not specified even though I was issuing the commands specified in the Mozilla build documentation: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/browser/config/mozconfig

The next hurdle was determining do after downloading the source. I spent a great deal of time at this juncture trying to extract various archives of the newly downloaded source via the Cygwin command prompt in a effort to start the build. I scoured through all the folders looking for an installer or build file. The most worrying part of this excercise was that I could not find my objdir even though I explicitly specified one in my .mozconfig file (i.e. firefox-objdir). Little did I know that I needed to issue a single command to proceed to the next step: make -f client.mk build which would initiate the build. Many thanks to Liz Chak for providing me with the information required.