I come back after a break for a while to play and I let it run to see if there's any patches. Then when I came back i saw an error message "This application has encountered an unspecified error. Please try this patch again."

Well it gives no button or option to retry the patch nor run a repair tool and the files has no launcherrepair.exe like I've seen when trying to figure out how to fix it and the cog's that you see at the bottom left of the launcher before you log in which allow access to the repair disappears after you log in which is a bit of an oversight in my opinion. The repair function say's it's only available after a patch or update that has resulted in an error which this error apparently doesn't trigger the repair tool.

You'll need to force a repair by deleting some files in your Bitraider folder (you can also just rename the Bitraider folder for the same results). See this post for more details.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=729911