How to avoid Merge clutter

Subversion marks unmodified files as modified - Stack Overflow explains why you get tons of extraneous files and folders as modified after doing a merge. Basic takeaways:

1. Always merge to the root directory.
2. Once merge info gets into a file or folder, the merge info gets updated with every merge.
3. The only way to fix this is with a recursive delete of the merge info in children of the project root.
4. Before doing this, you need to make sure that the list of merges in the project root is exhaustive, or you may end up applying a merge twice. This is unlikely however, as merge info is a recent addition to SVN, and the underlying code is designed to recognize if a merge has already been applied.