No matter what I do I can't seem to get rid of the -2 thats tacked on to some urls. I've purged, cleaned caches, checked for dupe items in menus, etc. Why does it append a -2 and how do I make it go away?

I guess we will need some more details about this to be able to answer your question.

First of all I would advice you to check the URL list in JoomSEF and search for the URLs in question -- that is \"..../from.html\" and \".../from-2.html\". (use filters to find them)

After you get them, check what is the original non SEF URL and how do they differ. That should give you answer. If you are not sure about it, post these non SEF queries here please.

Also please, check your JoomSEF configuration based on our FAQs that are discussing duplicate URLs /

Thats just it. .... No duplicates

I had a category named yada-etc.

The etc. confused my sitemap program because it ended up looking like:

yada-etc.\article

.\ not good in filename so I renamed the category yada-et-cetra and moved all the articles.

I then purged my sef urls and cleared the cache.

From the get go, 3 articles came up with the -2 filename with no duplicates to be found.

I also tried putting redirects to the new path in my .htaccess so Google wouldn't hit 404's for the urls in their index.

Could that have something to do with it?

I'll take a look at the config, .....having no dupes but ending up with -2 filenames isn't a big deal, just bothers me. Its not like I have duplicate content, or sef urls, but if more files get -2, I'll have to manually check every one to make sure.

There should be no reason to get xxx-2, if there is not already an URL without it existing (or was existing at time when xxx-2 was created). If there does not exist such now, you can just shorten the xxx-2 URL to xxx.