Fully clear the configuration before reloading, so that when the config
is read and merged in there are no existing values which mergeConfig
refuses to overwrite.
Avoids a race where the pipe could be inherited by another process
spawning at about the same time. If the other process didn't exit
quickly (e.g. if it was a custom script that did its own looping), it
would keep the write end of the pipe open, and so reading from the pipe
to try to get the command's output would block.
This bug manifested as some custom modules randomly not appearing in the
bar, requiring a reload to fix. The custom script had run and exited,
but the pipe had been inherited by another process, and the thread that
updated the module's output was blocked trying to read from it.
cptpcrd