Sometimes the PC is mightier than the User

As some of you may know, I twittered today that I had a hell of a time trying to resolve a number of issues on my laptop(yes it's Vista, but it's not usually a problem) which unfortunately manifested itself in my Lotus Notes client and Sametime clients.
Good news. Resolved all of it, will show how in a minute.
Bad news, Looks like Microsoft's fault. When I went to shut my laptop down to reboot it suddenly pops up and says I have 16 (!?) updates to install before reboot.

So the problem I have been seeing the last 2 weeks or so which finally caused all out war in my laptop was a Microsoft update?

And you wonder why I write about them the way I do. Look, I am getting this much closer to a linux laptop, like these!

So how to resolve anomalies that appear out of nowhere and may be Microsoft caused?

1) Sametime passwords suddenly stopped getting saved. This was I thought a Java problem as Sametime8 is eclipsed based and the answer as posted in the Sametime Forum is:

Close the client, delete the following and restart the client, enter the passwords and settings, close the client and restart it:

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application
Data\Lotus\Sametime\.metadata\.plugins\com.ibm.rcp.security.auth\*
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application
Data\Lotus\Sametime\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.setting
s\com.ibm.rcp.security.auth.ui.prefs

2) Trying to install R8.5 Beta(802 never wanted to install on my vista laptop but maybe now it will) and kept getting this error or a variation of it and it would stop everything.


Now the highly esteemed Nathan Freeman posted the "hard way" of clearing your pc. EDITED 8/26/08 FOUND IT:

Here is the link!
Suffice it to say you need to delete almost any reference to eclipse or rcp in your system and then reboot and install.
My temp directory had a 1.5gb eclipse directory. So now I have more free space and a working version of 8.5 beta code.

All's well that end's well, now to finish my Domino.doc to Quickr migration.