Cheers for the reply. What I am doing is running 'sum' on software on a unix machine and placing the checksums into a file.

Running a 'diff' command on the generated file and a 'gold' file

If these are different, then delete all the software and reinstall.

If I then run check sums again, it finds differences again (even though the install generated the 'gold' file).

One thing i have discovered is:
These are on empty directories. Is it because of the metadata that directories hold?

thanks,