Tortoise SVN crashed while checking in some files from my SVN working directory.

Trying to run SVN > Cleanup would not work, even from the command line:

svn: E155037: Previous operation has not finished; run ‘cleanup’ if it was interrupted

Yeah, that was exactly what I was trying to do. So running svn cleanup would just tell me to run svn cleanup to fix things up so that I could … clean up the working copy.

I suspected that some process was still running - so I rebooted my machine. But no, the problem did not disappear, which hinted me to a corruption of the .svn state.

Fixing svn cleanup E155037

To solve this issue, the quickest solution is to open the .svn/wc.db database, used by SVN to maintain its internal state, e.g. using an interactive SQLite browser (or a command line interface) and clear the work_queue table:

delete from work_queue

Don’t forget to commit the changes, then run svn cleanup again, from the command line or directly from Tortoise SVN, and everything should be working fine, at last.