Maybe I found a pitfall to this approach... have you seen this issue: I added a custom field to CB in the master, and I uninstalled CB in the slaves to reshare it, but the option to share wasn't available anymore. When I "propagated to children" there seemed to be no change. I don't really understand the "overwrite" checkbox, but with or without it made no difference. About the same time, I noticed the CB captcha plugin on the slaves stopped working. A look at the DB and all the tables are still tables, not views. Do you think I fouled something up with the database meddling?

On the Uddeim thing- I don't have any of those tables in my master- are they for components that integrate with Uddeim or other PMS? Are you saying there are just to many links to chase down?

Ok, strange. I added another plugin and tried uninstalling to reshare CB, and this time the "+" symbol came up and I could reshare it, and it's back to working. I don't get it, but I'm not knocking it...

In general, when you add field, their definition is saved in some table.
When you share an extension, MySQL keep the layout of the table as they was at the moment you shared the extension. So you can uninstall and re-install the extension to apply the changes when you share the extension.

The "overwrite" flag in the JMS Tool is originally defined to overwrite the content of a physical table and not for a link between tables. So it should not have any effect in this case.

Concerning the Uddeim extension, the other tables are probably used when other extension are installed. There are call to these other extensions that we didn't analyzed in detail.

The "+" icon is displayed when there is a definition of shared table.
In a plugin, it is displayed when there is the component that contain a shared definition.