So, I really wanted to try and get into the world of testing patches in order to help get Drupal 6 to the next beta stage but I was in a world of unknown. The root of the problem was the procedure that was needed in order to apply a patch to a file or group of files. See, I am using a windows machine and by default the Linux bash commands are not available. The patch procedures were showing “patch filename < patchname” and this was not going to work on my machine.