The problem that I am seeing with access to SLIME's CVS repository appears to be in the
(automatically generated?) compressed tar file available from SLIME's web site, too.

http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/snapshots/slime-current.tgz

Extracting the files from this .tgz creates a directory named 'slime-2010-01-27'.

$ cd slime-2010-01-27

No recent changes (since Jan. 19) can be found in the extracted files:

$ head ChangeLog
2010-01-19  Stas Boukarev  <stassats@gmail.com>

        * swank-rpc.lisp (:swank-rpc): (:use :cl), SBCL
        doesn't use it by default.

2010-01-19  Terje Norderhaug  <terje@in-progress.com>

        * Refactorized parts of slime.lisp into a new swank-rpc module.

2010-01-14  Stas Boukarev  <stassats@gmail.com>

$  /bin/grep 'defparameter \*validate-input' swank-rpc.lisp
(defparameter *validate-input* NIL

Is the CVS repository at common-lisp.net out of sync with the maintainers' repository?