I've downloaded Spring 3.0.2 with dependencies and found that it contains 405 jar files. I usually keep third party libraries in a "lib" subdirectory, but there are so many Spring jars that it seems sensible to keep them separately so that they don't swamp the other libraries and to simplify version upgrades.
I suspect that I want to keep the full set of libraries in Subversion, but only deploy the subset that is actually used.
Do Spring users have a standard way to deal with this problem?
The vast majority of the "dependencies" are unnecessary, it really is a "kitchen sink" distribution. I would suggest just putting the Spring JARs themselves into lib, and only add the others as and when you need them.
In fact, you can pick and choose which Spring JARS you need - it's split up into several, so that you can pick the appropriate ones. There should be a readme file in the distribution describing which JARs you need, and what they depend on.