Colon confuses custom_require (well an ancestor anyway)

I just started work on an existing project.  Rake would not run and kept dying with “no such file to load — ” exceptions in rubygems/custom_require.rb for files in a vendor/plugin/<foo>/lib folder.
It turns out that when I checked out the source from Subversion with:

svn co https://<hostname>:<portnumber>

It created a folder called <hostname>:<portnumber>
The colon in the path was confusing [...]