Questions on project reloading

One component in our stream contains 55 plugin and test projects which totals at about 50MB. If an error happens when accepting changesets in one of the project then it renders the whole component as out of sync. The only option for the developers is to reload everything and lose any unchecked-in changes or create patches (or commit the changes into their workspace). Either way they still have to process all of the components for reloading.

* does the reload download everything from the component or does it make a diff between what is already in the local workspace and only pull down the deltas?
* does it make sense to adopt a reloading/updating mechanism similar to clearcase wherein the user is given an option that if a file is modified then it will be left as is while the other files in the directory are updated or synchronized with the repository?

ciao!