I've recently had to do a restore which left me with a few renamed files/folder with a new name having a numerical value of (2). Can the files that have been renamed with the (2) be successfully renamed to the original name without the (2)? In other words as an example, delete the old folder without the (2) and rename the new folder losing the (2) in the folder name and renaming all the files within the folder that has (2) next to the file name but leaving the (2) off the file name also. Will XP recognize this if I do so?

If the file sizes & versions (system files) are the same, you can safely do that. I did the same with some 1500+ (system32 .dll) files a couple of days ago. Since YMMV, you want to be sure of the above before you actually start dumping the files.

Wow that's alot! In my case it's only a few and I have already done it with no ill effect and if it does puke I'll un install the program and clean up after it. I've been using 7zip beta 4.12 ever since it came out and decided to upgrade to the latest and something went terribly wrong. 7zip seized control over most everything launchable including add/remove, system restore, browsers, startup/run etc.. It just so happened that I placed in my control panel an icon for system restore which for whatever reason was not affected by the 7zip vacuum. I restored, and of course 7zip was the only folder/files(very few) that were renamed(2). I don't know what caused the 7zip problem but I think I'll just let the 7zip 4.42 version pass on by. Thanks

In todays versions of Windows you can several files with the same in the same folder. These files names has to be different in some way. That's why Windows put a version number in the filename. Test this bahaviour by rightclicking your desktop and select to create "New..." "Text document" (leve the default name unchanged). Then do this three times and you will se: New Textdocument.txt New Textdocument(2).txt New Textdocument(3).txt