A long time ago I was trying to do the editing part of this, and I have no idea why. I tried a lot of interesting and weird ways, and all of them crashed the Notes client. Anyhow, randomly today I came across
this document while trying to find the correct hex id's for the Help/Using and Help/About documents.
A quick read ..and there it is. I tried so many different methods and approaches (and some of them were rather elaborate) to try and find the source of the crash, but it seems that in the end it boils down to needing to delete the $Body field first. Such a small change - and without it, some of the client crashes were quite spectacular.
The really frustrating thing is that I can't remember why I wanted to do this in the first place. It was initially for a set of Server Administration tools I was developing a couple of years back, and I can find my original code in a development / proof of concept agent, but can't remember for the life of me what the eventual plan for it was!
Anyway, for the sake of indexing this entry correctly for anyone googling on the same subject, the correct codes for the hex codes for the Help / Using this database and Help / About this database documents in any Lotus Notes database are:
Using Doc = "FFFF0100"
About Doc = "FFFF0002"
Why would you want to do this? Well, the requirement to access it has a couple of uses. The best one I can think of is when you want to distribute file resources via a template (the example in question was relating to the mail template). Using either one of the above documents you could store files, access them via script, and then update them with a template upgrade. Any other solution (ie configuration document or profile document) would require a mass agent to update that document, which is a real pain in the ass.
As for editing - the best use I can think of is when combined with the launch option "Open first doclink contained in the 'About Database' Document" - script like this would allow you to update it via script when required. I know for a fact this isn't what I was planning to do with it though.