I have a number of existing similar projects that I would like to bring into
VSS and maintain as a number of branched sub-projects. Many of the files in
these projects are the same, while others have either minor or major
modifications.

My approach was to make a main project in VSS (call in MAIN), the bring one
of the my projects into VSS as a sub-project of MAIN.

MAIN > Project-A

I then added the files for Project A from the Project-A subfolder of the hard
drive. (Project names match folder names on hard drive)

I then created sub-projects Project B & C so that I now had:

MAIN > Project-A (with Project A files)
MAIN > Project-B
MAIN > Project-C

I then shared the files from Project A into Project B and Project C (by
dragging the files within VSS from Project-A into each of the other folders):

MAIN > Project-A (with Project-A files)
MAIN > Project-B (with files shared from Project-A)
MAIN > Project-C (with files shared from Project-A)

The hard drive folders of Project B and C have their own existing copies of
the source files, some of which are in fact different from the files in
Project A.

Now I set the working folders of each of the projects to a corresponding
folder on the hard-drive:

Project-A has working folder C:\MAIN\Project-A
Project-B has working folder C:\MAIN\Project-B
Project-C has working folder C:\MAIN\Project-C

My hope at this point to do a file compare on the project source files, which
(I think) should default to comparing the VSS copy of the shared files with
the existing source files in the hard-drive folders.

I would then branch all of the similar files and leave unbranched all
identical files.

For example, VSS's copy of a source file in project-B (that is currently
shared from project-A) would be compared with the identically named file in
the Project-B hard drive folder.

*** However *** the source file in Project-B is "not found" even though the
file exists in the project-B folder !

For example when I do a "show differences" on a file in VSS Project-B an
error message says:

File "C:\MAIN\Project-B\Source.cpp" not found

even though "C:\MAIN\Project-B\Source.cpp" in fact exists.

1. Is there some way to tell VSS to assume that it should take the existing
source files as belonging to its respective project, even though it knows
they are "shared".

2. In "show differences" for a project, why are files that are in fact
different from VSSs copy of the file listed when only "Show files that are
the same in both places" is checked ("Show files that are different in both
places" in unchecked).

3. What might be a better procedure ?

Apologies for the long post.

- Gerry

=====

Afterthought:

I tried one method that shows promise, which is to check out all files with

"Check out working folder version" UNCHECKED and
"Don't get local copy" CHECKED.

but when I try to "Show Differences" on the two projects (I don't want to
have to compare files one at a time) and list only files that are the same:

"Show files that are different in both places" UNCHECKED
"Show files that are the same in both places" CHECKED

(in order to check these files back in and then branch the remaining checked
out files),

then both the same and identical files are listed !

But when doing a "show difference" for an individual file (right-clicking
from within the project differences viewer), the difference viewer pops up as
(I would expect) and shows the differences between the exisiting source file
and the VSS copy of the file.

There are a lot of subtleties to the use of VSS that I obviously do not yet
understand !