I think what all of this really amounts to is a wanting a way to turn off the name compare part of alt-F4 (and, does this mean just names in directory alt-C or does it mean path and name).

Now, to do this and have it make any sense when done, the tags that are generated would have to distinguish what goes with what... The only way I can think to do that is to use something like a digit as the tag or some kind of marking in with the attributes. But, if the list is large, there is going to be trouble getting enough marks...

Maybe Kim could remame the files with something easily strippable. OK, so now what we have is a rename mask that will rename file XYZ.ABC to (say) 34fd__.XYZ.ABC (I obviously used a 16-bit hash here), and then a way to strip off those marks in rename. You could go through a directory of branch and do the rename, then sort by name. Now, all we would need is a control in alt-F4/alt-C to indicae that the name match only goes up to the __.

Still not an ideal solution, because there is always going to be the multimatching problem, but such a change to Rename (both to add and remove a hash) might address the problem the originators of the thread were trying to solve without a lot of hassle for Kim -- He just provides the rename functionality, and lets people sort out their own duplications...