Hi Clay, Dave,

For several reasons, I've been _STRONGLY_ discouraging use
of the 'Add Critical-List Objects', 'Add Distant Objects', and
'Add Unusual Objects (mostly NEOs)' features in the Add MPC
Comets/Asteroids function. In fact, I'm very tempted just to
remove those options; they cause little but trouble.

For asteroids, the best thing to do is to use MPCORB,
then _never_ add asteroids from Add MPC Comets/Asteroids again.
Just use that latter function to get comets.

There are two problems with this, though, and if I recall
correctly, you run into both of them. MPCORB is a big download
(over 20 MBytes), no fun when on dialup. And as Clay mentions,
you can get daily update files from MPC and get some objects that
haven't made it into 'mpcorb.dat' yet.

I _thought_ the duplicate asteroid problem had been effectively
clobbered, as of some time ago. (Though I'd still expect to see
problems if, for example, you have an older 'mpcorb.dat' file,
where the object is unnumbered, and attempt to add in data for the
numbered object. In such cases, Guide would usually not be able
to tell that the two objects were really the same... essentially,
the same sort of designation issue I mentioned with comets.)

Clay, when you say you "load new NEOs that have been reported
daily", do you mean you use 'Add Unusual Objects (mostly NEOs)'?

I'll do a bit of experimenting here and see if maybe something
I fixed got broken. Or if something was broken that I didn't catch.

-- Bill