Can you show me an example of a VSD user not having an index for the home page.

OK I see that when I link to the site from the bookmark it reads www.workhorsepainting.com in the url and if I link to the home pg from an in-site link then the url reads same as above plus /index.html and I guess that it has to do that for addressing purposes of being able to find the file
I am not complaining about that just noting that that is how it works. Kind of like geometry, have to understand the axioms before can start doing successful proofs.

The url doesn't matter for SEO. The words in the content are what the search engines will eat up. Make sure you have the key words you want to be searched for in the text on your page. Name your images with the same words.

For your home page the name does not matter for SEO. But for your links the names matter. If the search engines go to a page named flowers.html and it gets a baseball site then it will not think that link is relevant to your content. It may still index the page, but it does not help with your page rank.

And what if the page is about a player with the last name of Flowers?

Then his name would be in the content, and would match up with the name of the link. Then it would be a proper link title. But you should always make your links match your content.

What does Google think of this.
interiorexteriorpainting.html

I would say it would think it is too long. But for his site it would match the content. Yet, if he was using as he says as the index then it would probably not like it too much.

Thats why I said don't worry so much about the name of the url. Your example was to the far left. I would keep the url as short as possible like painting. I'm pretty sure it would be easy to have that word occur a few times in the content. Is Google going to sparse the words in the url if there's nothing separating them?

Oh dear, i started all this explaining to Greg that workhorsepainting.com/page3.html was not helpful

Infact interiorexteriorpainting was my suggestion

when google has found a page and shows up in search results it tends to do this

Search interior painting and decorator :: workhorsepainting.com/interiorexteriorpainting

Were not going to agree on this, but as i explained to Greg, he has had 0 hits with page3.html lets see in time if this improves his ranking.

I have proved with all my sites this has worked or would not have suggested it

and yes they are long and that is questionably not ideal

I have also suggested extra pages one for interior decorating, another for exterior decorating, another for exterior painting, another for exterior refurbishment another for exterior get new paint and so on and so forth.

advantage of diy your not paying a developer for each page, so have as many variations as possible with the content of each page matching the url and keywords and description.

my wedding car site has a page for each location for google to find and he gets good ranking for every town he asked me for.