After a lot of looking, reading, and experimenting, I finally fixed the problem of TBH creating an ungodly number of anonymous users in the User and Profile files. In the web.config file (the main one, NOT the one in the Admin folder) I changed the "allowAnonymous" value from TRUE to FALSE in the following line (it happens to be line# 80 in my file)...

                <add name="ShoppingCart" type="MB.TheBeerHouse.BLL.Store.ShoppingCart" serializeAs="Binary" allowAnonymous="true"/>

...to this...

                <add name="ShoppingCart" type="MB.TheBeerHouse.BLL.Store.ShoppingCart" serializeAs="Binary" allowAnonymous="false"/>


I believe that's the change that solved the problem. So if you don't want your User and Profile files filling up with thousands of junk entries, there's the fix.

I must admit, I don't understand WHY Marco set it the way he did to begin with. So if I'm missing some purpose behind the original setting, feel free to tell me what it was.

Thanx,
Wolven

He wants anonymous users to be able to put stuff in their cart. When they log in those items will be transferred to their authenticated identity.

Have you tried adding an item to the cart as an anonymous user?

Yeah, I tried it. It just takes you to the shopping cart page and tells you that "there are no items in your cart". i.e. You can't add items to the shopping cart unless you are a registered user. I'm thinking that when an anonymous user tries to add something to their cart, I'll send them a message saying they must be logged in to use the shopping cart. Or perhaps send them to the registration page AND display the message about the shopping cart. My thinking is, they are going to have to provide all the same personal info to make a payment as they would to register, so they might as well just register. In fact, I was thinking of having the payment info fields on the registration screen. They would be optional, until you get to the payment portion of the checkout process anyway...

Does anyone see a problem with this approach?

Thanx,
Wolven