Urgent help needed please

Hi I have 3 problems which are causing great pain, if anyone can give me some ideas.

A particular supplier has duplicated over 100 times in the HO & store database, items that should not be under this supplier are there also in each of the duplications. Has anyone seen this happen before and if so how did you fix it?
Occassionaly at the POS when an item is scanned or when a sale is finished the pos will hang for 20 seconds are so. I think this may be when it is trying to access the database on the server but it does not happen every sale.
How is store tax (vat in uk & ireland) added to an item in HO and what field in which table is this. Items are showing with no store tax in the HO but the branch has a tax against the item.

These are all on RMS 1.3 Thanks for any help

To find the cause of the multiple supplier issue:

From HQ Admin - New Query: SELECT ID, Code, SupplierName FROM Supplier WHERE Code = X

From SO Admin - New Query: SELECT HQID, ID, Code, SupplierName FROM Supplier WHERE Code = X

You should get a big list from Store Ops and only one record from HQ. All of the Suppliers with an HQID that doesn't match the ID from the HQ query will need to be deleted. Before we just go and delete them we need to check the SupplierList table to be sure they're not in use...

From SO Admin - New Query: SELECT ID, ItemID, SupplierID FROM SupplierList WHERE SupplierID = X

You'll need to do this for every ID you're thinking of deleting. If there offending SupplierIDs are sequential, you could use BETWEEN X AND Y in place of the = X portion of the query.

If any of the SupplierList records need to be changed from a bad supplier record to the correct one:

From SO Admin - New Query: UPDATE SupplierList SET SupplierID = X WHERE SupplierID = Y

Use the good SupplierID for X and the bad SupplierID(s) for Y. You can add the following if necessary: OR SupplierID = Z (repeat as necessary) or use the BETWEEN statement above.

Once there are no records in the SupplierList table that refer to an offending supplier, you can delete the duplicates:

DELETE from Supplier WHERE ID = X

BACKUP FIRST. Do not attempt if you have any questions about what you are doing. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Tom