Hi Bill
The duplicate home page Url is from the standard DNN Url Rewriter/Friendly Url Provider. On a standard DNN install, you can get to the home page via these links :
domain.com/
domain.com/default.aspx
domain.com/default.aspx?tabid=128
domain.com/home.aspx
domain.com/home/tabid/128/default.aspx
I have written a module which corrects this problem in two ways:
1) generates only one (the site root url) Url for the home page, so that the menu and other generated links do not have multiple versions of the same url.
2) allows you to automatically redirect the different urls back to that single Url, thereby ensuring that only one version of the Url is used in links, search engines and internally on the site.
You can download a trial version of the module at http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/Ur... . The module gives you a lot more control over the Urls on your site.
Another quick and easy alternative (for SEO purposes) is to include a canonical link element in your home page. While this won't change the various Urls, it does ensure that search engines like Google won't index the multiple versions. However, this won't change the visual aspect of the problem which you have identified.
Feel free to get in contact if you have any questions.
As for the performance aspect, I recommend you search for the performance related blog posts by Mitchel Sellers. They contain very useful information. You may also wish to investigate a 'keep alive' service which will periodically 'ping' your site and will keep it in memory on your server, which speeds up performance.