Maybe I should reword this first statement.
the ckecout actually goes well and all my project bits get dumped on my drive
locally.

after the actual ckecout, an extra step checks for the svn file
$ svn co -q --non-interactive http://samsonite.central.sun.com/svn DirectoryServer
$ svn info svn
ERROR: revision check failed

this fails because on unix it's there as a hidden file named .svn (dot svn)

/path/to/hudson/jobs/DS/workspace/DirectoryServer$ls -al | grep svn
drwxr-xr-x 7 al145121 staff 512 May 19 19:10 .svn
/path/to/hudson/jobs/DS/workspace/DirectoryServer$svn info .svn
Path: .
URL: http://my.subversion.server/svn
Repository UUID: 80270577-44fa-0310-af59-d331026e8b94
Revision: 805
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: myself
Last Changed Rev: 805
Last Changed Date: 2006-05-19 11:37:33 +0200 (Fri, 19 May 2006)
Properties Last Updated: 2006-05-19 19:10:06 +0200 (Fri, 19 May 2006)