[OSM-newbies] converting osm formats

[Adrian]

> Thank you for some of the limited responses I received, but still   
> conversion tools for windows seem to be lacking for OSM?  Am I   
> incorrect in this?

Most of the tools you need are available in Windows ports. ogr2ogr is 
available on Windows at http://fwtools.maptools.org/ and so is Postgis 
http://postgis.refractions.net/download/

The only problem is with osm2pgsql.

If you're looking for UK data then there are old versions of the SQL 
available at http://nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/downloads/planet/ that 
mean you don't need osm2pgsql.

You could also make yourself a virtual machine running Debian and use it 
for extracting OSM data, after all Debian is free but the learning curve 
is a bit steep.