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Netbeans should routinely check that imported libraries are identical to their IDE-level copies. If there is any sort of mismatch it should: 1) Trigger a project-level warning (similar to what we see today when a source folder is missing). 2) Allow the user to replace his imported copies with the (potentially newer) IDE-level copies. For example, at one point Netbeans moved from JUnit 4.1 to 4.5 but developers who had previously imported the "JUnit4" library had no way of upgrading and were never notified of the update. See issue 122930 for an example of how much grief this has caused and how much time is wasted on these kinds of errors.
Reassigning to projects.
Right now "project properties -> libraries" contains the library name and a checkbox for "package". I suggest adding a checkbox item called "synchronize" if the library name exists as a global library. If synchronize is enabled and the project libraries are mismatched Netbeans would issue a warning and allow the user to import the updated copy. If the user wishes to suppress the warning he would simply uncheck "synchronize". This feature would also be backwards compatible in that you could default "synchronize" to false for older projects and to true when libraries are imported into newer projects. Please give this feature serious consideration for Netbeans 7.0