commit problem with 1.4.2 (r22196)

I asked about this in #svn on freenode earlier and the awesome peterS
attempted to help me out with it, but unfortunately we were unable to
come up with a solution.

The problem is this:
"svn-commit.tmp" 6L, 137C written
Sending Mailfilterer.pm
Transmitting file data .svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MERGE request failed on '/repo/trunk/perl/Ndn/Dreamhost/Service'
svn: Valid UTF-8 data
(hex: 4f 63 74 20 31 35 20 31 38 3a 33 30 3a 35 34 20 32 30 30 38 5d 20
70 60)
followed by invalid UTF-8 sequence
(hex: 9a 02 3a 20)
svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
svn: '/home/jeremyk/devel/ndn/perl/Ndn/Dreamhost/Service/svn-commit.tmp'

Now, everything I've been able to find on google about this has
suggested a filename in the same directory with non-utf8 characters.
This is not the case, so I'm a little lost. The weird thing is the
contents of the hex:

Oct 15 18:30:54 2008] p`?:

I think the ? character is the invalid utf character as specified by
9a02 in the hex above.

The timestamp there is the time I attempted the commit, and the
p`<whatever>: is gibberish, the file does not have any sequence such as
that within it.

We have tried 4 different working copies from 2 different machines (and
one fresh working copy after I started troubleshooting), and all of them
give this error.

Details on the setup:
svn 1.4.2 (r22196) on both client and server
client OS: debian sarge 32-bit
server OS: debian etch 64-bit
svn server: apache 2.2.9 with mod_dav and mod_dav_svn
repository is an fsfs repository created by using svn load to load a
dump file created by cvs2svn

the error.log file from apache shows pretty much the same:
[Wed Oct 15 18:30:54 2008] [error] [client 10.x.x.x] Could not MERGE
resource "/repo/!svn/act/35f6b8cc-5459-0410-9701-84b585593b56" into
"/repo/trunk/perl/Ndn/Dreamhost/Service". [409, #0]
[Wed Oct 15 18:30:54 2008] [error] [client 10.x.x.x] An error occurred
while committing the transaction. [409, #22]
[Wed Oct 15 18:30:54 2008] [error] [client 10.x.x.x] Valid UTF-8
data\n(hex: 4f 63 74 20 31 35 20 31 38 3a 33 30 3a 35 34 20 32 30 30 38
5d 20 70 60)\nfollowed by invalid UTF-8 sequence\n(hex: 9a 02 3a 20)
[409, #22]

The only real weirdness with the file itself is that it has windows
format LFs, but even after running the file through dos2unix the error
persists.

Any help that could be provided with regard to this issue would be
greatly appreciated. If more information is required from me to
troubleshoot this issue, please let me know, and I'll see what I can do!

-Jeremy