SVN Commit error: Can't open file txn-current-lock Permission denied

For me it ended up being a permissions issue on the server. I have my repo on a linux box, and ssh in to use svnadmin. For convenience sake, I had executed my create repository command as root. I was looking to get source I had on my Windows box into the repo, so was using TortoiseSVN to set up trunk/branches/tags. The directory containing the repo on the server was owned by root, and Tortoise was coming in as apache. I chowned the directory on the server to apache:apache, and it all went smoothly.

chown apache:apache -R my_repo_root

This is a server configuration issue. On windows host Visual SVN server runs under NETWORK SERVICE account by default. I solved this problem by granting full access rights to the repository folder to this account. Another option is switching Visual SVN service to the SYSTEM account, but that could pose a potential security risk.