Meld to the rescue
I officially hate CVS now. And I really really love meld.
I had been working on a project for a company. The sourcecode we got from a different company (for a wireless access point) was in a rather bad shape, so I just started hacking on it to get it working for us.
The long-term plan was always to “dismantle” the source into proper upstream tarballs and diffs with the changes, to allow for easier upgrades. But it never got that far.
Sometime after I left the project (for my research stay at Berkeley), the source was checked in into CVS without the -kb flag. So when I now recently wanted to do a diff to the CVS checkout I got, in order to see what was changed in the meantime I got tons of changes, all as boring as changed $Id$ and $Header$ statements. Aaargh.
Fortunately, meld has an option to hide these changes. I love it.