If you, like me, use a combination of Tortoise SVN and SVN on Cygwin, you might have noticed, like me, that they don’t dance too well.

The problem seems to be down to TSVNCache.exe locking files (sometimes in SVN folders, sometimes not). Mostly, my problems were when I performed an SVN operation from cygwin, it’d give me errors about files being locked or no longer being there, and suggesting to run svn cleanup, which only resulted in the same, varying, errors.

The solution? Kill TSVNCache.exe from your process list, go to where you installed Tortoise SVN (e.g. c:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN), and in the bin folder, you’ll find the executable. Rename it. Problem solved. I lose the SVN status icons on my folders in Explorer, but I never used them anyway. For me the loss of those is definitely worth the less grief I have no in using both environments. Of course there might well be other caching functions, but I haven’t noticed any degraded performance, just the status icons missing. YMMV.