(This isn't really DIY. It's more of a but report.)

I was getting consistent errors on one of my directories.

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: OPTIONS request failed on '/images'
svn: OPTIONS of '/images': 301 Moved Permanently (http://svn.lolitics.org)

The problem was that the svn client was failing to honor the redirect request that sends requests for http://foo/bar to http://foo/bar/ with the trailing slash. I couldn't figure out why it was happening on this directory and not others.

After much research, I found only one reference to a similar problem: http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-09/0960.shtml

That thread, however, didn't provide the real solution.

The solution was found in the default httpd.conf file. Adding the following line to the httpd.conf of other apache configuration file will fix the problem:

BrowserMatch "^SVN.*" redirect-carefully

That will match the command-line SVN client.

HOWEVER, after searching for "BrowserMatch SVN", I found some discussion on this:
1, 2, 3

So, not unheard-of, but not rare either. Perhaps it is an interaction between a specific version of the client, and specific versions of the server(s). I'm using svn, version 1.4.4 (r25188).