SVN Error Pristine text not found

Doing some work today I started having a little trouble with my working copy. For reference we use visualSVNServer over an HTTP connection on our local network, and our client tool isSmartSVN. I tried to commit some code and got an error that SVN was busy. Not really sure what that meant, I waited a second and tried again, now it tells me:

Commit failed: Pristine text not found

Again, not sure what that means, lets try to update, same error. OK, obviously something borked in my working copy, clean-up usually fixes that. Again: "Pristine text not found" What does google have to say about it? Not a whole lot, just that other people have seen that error, and no real clues on how to fix it.

Since we upgraded to subversion 1.7 I have noticed that periodically SmartSVN tells me I should validate my admin area. When it's done this in the past I've noticed status messages saying something about pristine somethings or other, so I run the validate admin area command, and low and behold we seem to be getting somewhere. I get a warning that my pristine copy isn't correct and that SVN is going to try and fix it, but if it doesn't I should do a fresh checkout. I let it do it's thing and it makes a few notes that it's removing some items from the pristine table, and warns me that it installed some new pristine files and even downloads a copy of one of my files from the repo to restore my pristine copy.

Interestingly the file it gets is a revision number higher than my current working copy. What's this? It appears that somehow my commit succeeded to the repo, but my client didn't seem to realize it. So in the end, simple client error resulted in a working copy that was out of sync, and validating the admin area was able to clear it up. I'm now able to update my working copy and commit code with no problems again.