If you hate that TortoiseSVN slows down your Windows developer machine and you need to grab some source code from a Subversion server there is the following alternative.
Just use a command line tool that is lightning fast: Subversion for Windows
To checkout some source code simple type: svn co <host>
To remove all the sometimes pretty annoying .svn folders here are some very helpful lines of code.
for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%i in ('dir /s /b /a:d *svn') do (
rd /s /q "%%i"
)
Just place the above lines into a file called removeSvn.cmd, place it into the polluted folder and then run it. Done.
Another resources on this topic: