Reid - 2:20 pm on May 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

If you make an error there is an out.
Since the removal tool is an axe on steroids maybe I should tell a bit about it.
1don't use a complicated robots.txt file (you never know what could go wrong) replace it with a simple robots.txt designed specifically for googlebot to remove those pages. (whatever is disallowed will be axed from google)
In the URL removal tool there are 3 options, one option is to submit URL of robots.txt file.
After you submit it you will be given a list of pages "pending removal"
If something went wrong (your home page or some important page is in the list) then don't panic, it takes 24-36 hrs for the removal to happen and google will revisit robots.txt during the process.
If you like what is going to be removed then leave the robots.txt alone until the removal goes through but if you do not want one of the "pending" pages removed then simply remove the robots.txt file from your site and the removal process will fail. (It will come up "page removed" or "removal failed".