In spectral theory on Banach spaces, certain more incisive results hold when the underlying space is weakly complete (that is, weakly sequentially complete). The standard proofs rely on the following deep theorem: any bounded linear map from the algebra of all complex continuous functions on a compact Hausdorff space to a weakly complete Banach space is weakly compact. The proof of this result depends in turn on a considerable amount of measure-theoretic machinery (see [4, Section VI.7]). We present here some alternative methods which avoid these technicalities. The results are then used to give an example of a set of projections, each having unit norm, which generate an unbounded Boolean algebra.