Quick note that the Announcement has been updated to include links to the specific course PDFs as well as links to the online version of those courses where one is available.

We are still looking for some more people from our larger implementation community to take part in this Beta Test - please sign up today if you haven't already done so! (and THANK YOU in advance :) )

You should still be able to get into the instance while it has an expired key ... you just can't make multiple simultaneous connections to it.  You can also grab the iris.dat files from the file system (which actually stores the globals) and then mount them to another instance.  Or you can just upgrade that instance to a new version of the Community Edition (which is likely the easiest approach)

It should be safe to edit manually as long as you are not changing the piece numbers or changing the order around.  Simply changing the property name within  <Value>...</Value> of the storage definition should be fine if it is no longer used at all.  In our case, we have had instances in the past where we needed to change a property name and rather than creating a new property and migrating the data it proved to be safe and much more efficient to change the property name in both the property definition and the storage definition (as well as all of the places in the source code which refer to it).  The nice thing about this approach is that we've been able to simply do a Find/Replace in all of the source code and carefully review the diffs before submitting.  

If others are aware of gotcha's when changing the storage definition Value, I would be interested in hearing them.

as Vivian explained, you can delete the property definition and then change the name in the storage definition to make it clear that that slot should be ignored.  This of course should be done while keeping versions of everything in source control so that the reason for the change is documented and discoverable in the future should someone need to understand why the property was removed.  

Thanks for quick fix @Evgeny Shvarov!!  Also, thanks for the details that some types are not supported, that is good to know.  At this point I think I am good with letting it take it's best guess and then editing the class afterwards if needed.  With SQL LOAD coming hopefully there will be less need to one-off utilities that do this but I am thankful that it was available for what I needed this week!!