Thanks for noticing Bev!
While I'm posting here, I'll give a brief update on some things I've been doing yesterday and today.
Some of you may have noticed a couple of briefs points last night and this morning when the site was a little flaky. That was not your connection, it was me making a few more adjustments.
In the days after I fixed the database in that marathon session the other day, I started to notice the buildup of the same exact symptoms as before, so I have been running a few experiments yesterday and today to see if I could take another stab at isolating the root cause. You don't know how my heart sank when I started seeing all the junk records building up in the database again.
The good news is that not only have I found it, but I believe it's a bug in the database program code that Microsoft is probably not even aware of. It is such a nasty bug that it has literally taken me months to figure it out. It turns out that a program must be constructed in just such a way for the bug to be triggered, and of course, according to Murphy's Law, that's the exact way my programs are constructed!
Once I figured out the bug, I had to do some trial and error just to be sure that was actually it, and then a little more trial and error to find a work-around.
Well, the work-around turned out to be such a nice piece of coding (can you hear my patting myself on the back? ) that it is actually a much more efficient way to do the same thing, and the site has again become a little snappier performance-wise. I have also fixed a long-nagging bug that sometimes transferred people to the wrong page after a login or logout.
One thing in all of this that was pretty astounding was that I figured out what was causing the bug in an epiphany-like moment, and I wasn't even on my computer at the time. It just came to me, as if all the sudden the answer was standing right in front of me, plain as day. You'd have to have had one of "those moments" to know what I'm talking about, but I can best describe it as a "clarion moment", where all the sudden I saw everything with crystal clarity. The greatest part was that it came to me as I was driving my Corvette down the road. How cool is that?