You need to put quota-meta assertions around your regex. e:\svn is interpreted as e-colon-space-vn.
Write your regex as:
s/\Q$svnroot\E//i;
Note: this is probably not the best way to do what you are doing, but it answers the question of "Why doesn't this work?"
In reply to Re: search and replace frustration
by thundergnat
in thread search and replace frustration
by gheard
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