If I publish an incomplete site just to see if I can spot any problems or to allow selected users to preview it, is there any way to hide the site from search engines until I later complete it? (I would be using VSD.)

Thanks,
Don Culp

Don, If you're doing nothing to get the site noticed (submit to search engines, SEO), it won't show up unless someone types in the URL for it (it might be on page 3487 of a Google search, but no one will dig that far! ).
You could put up an intro page to say what the site is and that it's coming soon as your index page, then just not link that to your other pages while you're still working on them. When the site's ready, switch your actual home page to index and get rid of the intro page.

You could goto google webmaster tools and generate some robots text to exclude your content. Painbrush's approach is the best for a site that your working on.

thought I read somewhere this code would help with that....

Put this a text file named robots.txt and upload it to your web root.

Or you can put this in the header of every html page.