you can edit the default.aspx if you want to change the fixed meta tags. As for multiple copies of the same tag, my guess is that different search engines will treat them in different ways i.e. some will merge them and some will take only the first.

Cathal

I am just now beginning to appreciate the conflicting message I've been giving these robots.

The directives in my robots.txt file do not coincide with the meta tags that are automatically inserted via default.aspx.
What if I tell a robot that a page is disallowed in the robots.txt, but tell the bot to "INDEX,FOLLOW" in the meta for the page itself...

Since the entire point of the search bots is to index and follow links (isn't it?), and the entire point of my robots.txt and sitemap tools is to control what not to index  -- I wonder what the utility of the default.aspx robots "index,follow" instruction is...

Is this inherently conflicted, or no big deal?