The advice I've been getting has been going in circles.

I've looked directly at the database now, and found that when JoomSEF purges the SEF URLs, it hasn't been purging all of them. There were over 145,000 records in jos_redirection!

I emptied the table myself, and all the SEF urls are back to normal, BUT it occasionally will create a programs-and-services-2.html or something like that. Why is JoomSEF generating these?

Looking into the jos_redirection table again, something is setting a value to the dateadd field to the original url, and then JoomSEF recreates the link as -2.html, -3.html, and so on. Not only does it recreate the link as a duplicate, but it also won't purge the old link (because of the dateadd value).

Why is JoomSEF assigning dateadd values to certain urls (and later assigning duplicates)????

Was there ever an answer or fix for this issue? It seems similar to what I'm experiencing.

I'm afraid not. The responses here were largely just repeated over and over, when many of them clearly had not read the thread all the way through.

I did (on my own) manage to get the SEF urls down to one per page, but they insist on generating at the highest number, so instead of:

www.yourdomain.com/aboutus.html

It says:
www.yourdomain.com/aboutus-63.html

Going into PHPmyadmin and emptying the jos_redirection table on your own (not using JoomSEF's backend to purge) helped temporarily. My site is back up to 86 000+ pages already though, in the month since I've done it (we only have about 600 articles, so explain that).

Anyway, I've been working on upgrading to Joomla 1.6, and do not plan to reinstall JoomSEF. I'll be going to sh404sef.

Best of luck to you. My experiences (as well as my co-worker's) has lead us to leave Artio products well enough alone, unfortunately.

I hate to hear that. I'm still waiting on anyone to help me with a similar post: www.artio.net/support-forums/joomsef/joo...3-etc-and-swmenufree and am getting worried that I'll have to unistall JoomSEF too.

I was finally able to get rid of the -2, -3, etc though I have no idea why it stopped. Now it's just recreating the same SEF url over and over. Ex. I have hundreds of urls my my privacy policy after deleting all of them only a couple of days ago. This isn't going to be manageable especially for a part time rookie.

Let us know how 404 does for you....in case I need to switch.

Thanks and best of luck!