This is never a good thing to hear in the software (maybe any) world.  The follow-on sentence will usually melt away any ideas you had about being on time, on budget, taking vacation time, you name it.

For a project here it was switching operating system to Linux from Windows.  Not particularly bad since they are running Java all-around, but there is always some wierd, buried aspect of Java that you are using that really doesn’t work the same way on Linux versus Windows.  There is also a lot of testing that has to be added in to account for the o/s change to make sure all the programmers didn’t add in Windows-like tendencies: file i/o, file naming, network access, threads, etc…

So, of course, once the first blow was digested the follow-on statement came out that we need Active Directory, which is a Windows product, so need another computer just to run that, but we need everything on a small footprint, and it was going to be a blade server, but is looking to be a standard server, …

I wonder if these statements were well-known, decided months ago and we never were in the loop or did someone have an idea in the shower or maybe had an idea in the shower months ago and never told anyone?  Assuming these kind of things are not limited to software, I am guessing the latter: someone was sitting on a decision that is/will wreak havoc with the rest of the world but has very little affect on them.  So, why mention it?