Well hopefully you can actually USE the TortoiseSVN. There seems to be some problems with locating of files, but I still haven't been able to induce the error. 12X seems to be the only person who can break it. So if you find that TortoiseMerge doesn't automatically open, please let me know how to reproduce it.
And yes, some time ago people wanted to be able to minimize the debug panel, so it's by default now.