SVN frustrations

Again... I don't want this to be a techie blog (probably because I'm in the land of the blind, and I have one eye... and I've seen the land of the sighted...)

Anyway, my searches on google failed to help me here, so I am hoping this will help people out. (THIS IS DONE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!)

My SVN kept dying (during checkout - and afterwards during update). And leaving me with a state where neither svn up, or svn cleanup would work. Giving me this error:
svn: Error processing command 'modify-wcprop' in

The advice other people gave, was to remove the directory and start over... this works ok, but the trouble is when it's in the root of the 50mb svn... then remove the directory (and it's subdirectories) won't work.

Here's what I did, and again... NO WARRANTY.

I deleted the .svn/lock file. Then I just did svn up, and it completed it!

Anyone reading this, that know and understand why this is a bad thing please comment. Also if you did it and it worked, also please comment.