Symptoms

1. Login attempts to Atlassian Apps and Apache static HTML pages works fine
2. Changing the password to another password without the £ sign resolves the issue temporarily

Cause

This is discussed here: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=757&dsMessageId=2669329 . Apparently TortoiseSVN encodes the password in UTF-8 before the password is sent to the server. Hence, the £ sign is encoded before being sent, causing an invalid password failure

Workaround

As per the Symptoms above, changing the password to a password that does not contain the £ sign will resolve the issue. This is a workaround, and not a real resolution. Real resolution needs to come from a proper fix to this: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=757&dsMessageId=2669329 (do not encode the password to UTF-8 before passing it to Apache)