jharmon wrote:Ecah time a sample set is assigned to an ALT Hauptwerk icon the set has to be "installed and assigned". Does this occupy more hard disk capacity as I have been assigning some large sets to more than one icon?
If you load a sample set in multiple configurations (desktop short-cuts/aliases) then each one will have a cached version of the sample set (since the configurations have independent rank settings), so yes -- some additional drive space will be used.
In OS X's Finder, you could check how much space your Hauptwerk installation is using in total by right-clicking on the /Hauptwerk folder (at the very top level of your drive -- N.B. not the one in your home folder), and selecting 'Get info'.
jharmon wrote:A second question - when an extended set is downloaded and assigned, can the original set be uninstalled (i.e. if the Skinner Oakland extended set is loaded can the original Skinner set be uninstalled or must it remain installed?)
No -- usually an extended set will use and require the samples from the original/non-extended version, so you would need to keep keep both installed.