In attempting to figure out why we are getting this error I looked at this question.
Unfortunately it is not the same issue and the answers were unhelpful.
Our repository has an external property - and it was this directory that was showing the error when doing a "fresh" checkout.
The issue we discovered is:
- The project has an external property on a folder
- We someone then added a folder in the same place with the name of the subfolder in that property
\trunk\project \trunk\project\foo has an external with property of: bar pointing to some url
someone then committed a folder called bar under foo
This screws up everything. (there are now two copies of the folder with conflicting information about the svn url)