Ran in to the same issues with our upgrade from 5.2 to 5.3. Looked at the VDM logs and sure enough the JAVA BRIDGE error was showing.
I had a few things going for me that I believe contributed to the failed update.
1- VCop for view was installed.
2- Blast was installed - It is now included and labeled as HTML Access
I uninstalled VCops & Blast. Then proceeded to backup the AD LDS db. using VDMExport.
I uninstalled the connection broker then rebooted the server.
I then installed 5.3 and rebooted once more.
After the reboot looked at services and eveything that needs to be running was.. I was back in business. I then updated the security server and all is well in OZ.
Larry