The repeated 401 errors only seem to happen while the owncloud client is open. After doing the oauth2 authentication, the client goes back to “Reopen browser”, but a tail -f on the apache access log shows a constant stream of 401 errors like the client keeps retrying. As soon as I close the client window, the 401 errors stop.
So I think now its just resolving the 401 and I got this beat.