Subversion, connection reset

I am having a great deal of difficulty performing "history" oriented operations in subversion. Installed version is 1.6.x on a LAMP Ubuntu server. I am using Eclipse as a SVN client but I've also tried it with SVNx, and Tortoise on a Windows instance.

The error I am getting when performing a "compare with latest from repository" is

SVN: '0x0000000c: Locate URL in History' operation finished with error: svn: Connection reset

I have set the apache TIMEOUT directive at 1200, but the error comes up after about 5 minutes.

Suggestions? This is killing me...

Try changing the http-timeout in your ~/.subversion/servers file

see http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.confarea.html

Never changed it in eclipse's subclipse plugin but looks like this setting might be relevant:

Team > SVN > Configuration Location

I've seen this setting misnamed in IntelliJ as a "proxy timeout"