> When I run Inventory checks should I be using both Refresh Configuration and Refresh Inventory?
The configuration refresh stuff is pretty simple and doesn't involve much data, so that's fine.
> I'm not clear on the uses of both.
The console maintains a saved set of the configuration properties of a machine - basically, all the things we let you change via a configuration change task step - so that we can put all those things back when you send an image down. That's the real purpose of the "apply default configuration" option in the configuration change step - you can send down a new image, but have the machines all set to whatever their "default" configuration is.
Doing a configuration refresh checks the current settings of the machines, and saves their current settings as the default ones.
The "inventory refresh" process is used for things like the dynamic folders system; there's a lot more of that data, and you can write some pretty elaborate queries on it to determine things like which machines have some particular application installed on them.
> Could this be a corrupted database?
It seems unlikely - I suppose it's possible, but I've never seen a physically damaged database file. What it's more likely to be is a bug in the database engine where it decides to bail out and quit rather than try and proceed - that's generally the way database engines work, because if they do detect anything wrong they would rather "fail safe" in a way that doesn't lead to data corruption. There is a newer version of that database runtime (which is what we included in GSS1.1) and it should be less prone to whatever internal problem your one is suffering.
As I said above, if you e-mail me I can walk you through a process for trying the GSS1.1 version of the database code so we can see if that helps at all.
> Is there a way to clear it out and start fresh?
You can do a bulk delete of all the existing inventory data if you want to write an SQL query - "
DELETE FROM WMIData" should be all it takes, although it may take a little while to run - but I think it'd be better to try a newer database runtime engine first.