In this branch we made a pass through the code commenting on and
documenting the most important bits, and cleaning up and refactoring
where possible while maintaining existing behavior.

Thanks to Anthony, Mike, and Brian for explaining some of the history
of and rationale for what's in tree.

We already checked the number of usable rows, and nothing has changed.

We were simply discarding unused the first time we retrieved here.

We were making a copy of the fifo name and stripping any domain name,
but then not using the value.

Reduce number of local variables where possible; consolidate lines.

This marker value is only used in one place.

If getting the DB handle failed during the load or reload of the
configuration, we would leak the XML structure we just allocated for
the configuration.