After some trial and error, I found that in order to download a module from CVS without all those pesky CVS subdirectories everywhere, you can use the export command instead of the checkout command, providing I have logged in with my cvs account:
$ cvs -d :pserver:victorkanedrupalorg@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib export -DNOW -d salesforce contributions/modules/salesforce
This is not a sandbox oriented, but repository oriented command. It will export vis a vis date "now", into the salesforce subdirectory the contributions/module/salesforce module.