I can confirm that. Deleting is only possible if the user has write permnissions on the ENTIRE path.
/ top/subdir/mypath In order to delete mypath, the user needs write permission on / /top/subdir /top/subdir /top/subdir/mypath With an 1.6.x server, write access to /top and above were not necessary. I could not find any documentation about this changed behavior. Next, it is not really what we want. I don't want to give all users write access on the entire tree up to the rootfolder just to enable them to svn delete their own files and folders.