The drools guys did a really nice move from Subversion a few years back.
http://blog.athico.com/2010/12/drools-migrated-to-git.html
One of the key things they did, was reorganize their poms and project structure.
I'd be willing to help out. I think there could be a lot more to this move than
I think I've seen a similar error come up on a few boxes of my own. I think it
has something to do with the lastUpdated terminator in your repository. I've
had some success removing this off of POMs that wouldn't download.
Alternatively, nuking the repository might help.
My two cents.
