interesting CVS problem

[Fran Fabrizio]

Here's a scenario I ran into this weekend, wondering what the proper way
to handle it would have been. (I know what I did was horrendous)

1.  A user had checked in a bunch of images without -kb, and thus the
images were corrupted when I tried to view them after checking them back
out.
2.  I told the user to delete the images from his working directory,
then use cvs remove to remove all of them, and then commit.  Then, add
back in clean versions and commit again.
3.  User did this, and instead of being added as new files, they were
coming up as modified files (as if they weren't really deleted.)  (Did
he need to delete entire working directory and recheck out?)  User was
using WinCVS, not sure if this was a factor.
4.  I then checked out the project (images included) and 'rm *.gif'
followed by a cvs remove <filename>.gif for all files (by the way, is
there an easier way to remove 20+ files than having to rm them from the
filesystem first and then enter all the individual filenames on a cvs
remove command?!)
5.  While I was 'cvs remove'ing files, I got a conflict, saying that
'another user has modified deleted file foo.gif.  Conflict created.
Please resolve...yada...yada".  Only, foo.gif was no longer in my
working directory.  I would do a cvs update foo.gif and it would say
"conflict...please resolve..." but still no foo.gif reappeared in my
working directory.  So I had no way to even attempt to resolve the
conflict. (which would have been impossible on a binary file anyway, but
it brought up the general issue of "if I rm a file and then try to 'cvs
remove' the file and another user has modified it, why can't i get it
back to resolve conflicts and then finish removing it?)
4.  Pressed for time, I then went into the actual repository and deleted
all of the ,v files for the images.
5.  Had user checkout the project.  Naturally, he got an empty images
directory, added all of the images back in, and all was hunky dory.
6.  I thought this would then cause other users problems since
potentially they'd still have the old images and the versions in the
repository mgiht be lower than the versions in their working
directories, but I think the images were all at initial revision and had
never been modified at the time of deletion so this ended up not being
an issue I think.

So my question is, how *should* I have handled this?  I also will gladly
accept any and all razzing about the way I abused CVS. =)

Thanks,
Fran