I had a problem with committing changes after merging two branches of my project using TortoiseSVN.
Here are details:
I did a merge branch to trunk of pr
1.3 of TortoiseSVN is very old, the latest revision being 1.5.x. There have been numerous changes in both Subversion and TortoiseSVN since 1.3, so upgrading your client is probably your best bet.
Having said that, 1.5 TortoiseSVN is going to create/update Working Copies to a version 1.5 format. BE VERY CAREFUL when using TortoiseSVN (or any SVN client) against a previous Subversion's working copy.
svn:external will cause Subversion to combine different repository paths on check-out, but ultimately those paths are still 'disjoint', so you have to do two commits to get the changes applied.
Here's the relevant quote from Version Control with Subversion
And Subversion still truly operates only on nondisjoint working copies. So, for example, if you want to commit changes that you've made in one or more of those external working copies, you must run svn commit explicitly on those working copies—committing on the primary working copy will not recurse into any external ones.
I think I remember reading about a bug relating to this in TortoiseSVN that's been fixed in the latest release. Check the latest release notes.