Epic recursion fail

I was trying to figure out how to open an existing project in eclipse and not doing very well. I was told you need to press import and import an existing project into the workspace.
I had the workspace as the repository folder with the project in. I then pressed import and when I pressed import it said "invalid project description" or something similar. I then checked copy project to workspace and tried again. This time it seemed to work. It was taking a while so I waited and played solitaire. Eventually I get a tortoise SVN has had to close, send error report? error come up, then I cancel the import and go to check the directory.

The folder had the following folders within

.metadata
.svn
bin
ELEC6050

the ELEC 6050 folder had
.metadata
.svn
bin
ELEC6050

that ELEC 6050 folder had
.metadata
.svn
bin
ELEC6050

etc.

An example of recursion without a base case. So I go to delete the folder and I get this message:
"the folder 'ELEC 6050' contains items whose name is too long for the Recycle Bin. Do you want to permenantly delete it?"
I choose yes, then get this message:
"Cannot delete ELEC6050: the file name you specified is not valid or too long. Specify different file name."

so I have an idea, rename the 'ELEC6050' folders to 'e' and see if that reduces the length. Unfortunately then I find out I can just see deeper into the recursion.