Lightroom Classic creating thousands of duplicate RAW photos on my drive.

I just found out that lightroom has created thousands and thousands of duplicate photos of some of my collections.  I've used Lrc for many years and do not believe it is user error.  It did this once before and I had to start my collection over.  I've spent all year and I'm only halfway through recreating my catalog of travel photos from backups.

My actual photo files are organized by year/month.  2024/July originally had about 300 photos when I imported it in August.  Now the folder has 2,110 photos - some of them duplicated up to 6 times.  They are not virtual copies.  Theres no telling how many other duplicate photos it's made in other folders.  On the last catalog it created 11,000 duplicate raws that I could easily find and unknown amount of others. 

I can use AllDup to go through the files to find the duplicates and delete them from my drive, leaving the largest file of each grouping of duplicates.  Thats fairly easy.  Some are only single duplicates that have both NEF and DNG.  When I import my Nikon raw NEF files I always convert them to DNG inside of LrC.  I looked and I do have the "delete originals after successful conversion" checked.  I've made sure every single time.

But when I get all of the duplicates deleted from my SSD how to do bulk tell LrC to use the remaining files?

How do I stop LrC from creating additional duplicates in the future?  This is so insanely frustrating.

I use the C drive / main system drive for my catalog and image tiles.  No external drives are used.  It's a 2TB drive.