Those extra records could be from customized invoice-line-specific extended descriptions, and are not necessarily "dead weight".

That would be perhaps 100 lines total.  We seldom to that.  We have evolved our descriptions significantly to support our ecomm.  My reseller found an old 2017 notice that extended descriptions from S/O don't get removed.  510,927 of my descriptions are from V/I.  Perhaps that's the same situation as S/O.  "Engineering" was suppose to look at it but since the inherent flaw of extended descriptions was never addressed, I wouldn't expect that this would either.

I just learned that the original storage was expanded so the key is now in about 30 files that are review for each entry.  With the very first iteration, it wasn't maintained for invoice history.

I think reality is now dictating this will not get executed again; it would probably take weeks to finish.

Thanks for offering up a possible explanation, Kevin.

Note that you have extended description records for sales orders, invoices and purchase orders.  If you change the description the record gets updated. If you purge the extended description table you will have unforeseen consequences when viewing older purchase orders or invoices.