My understanding from Matt Cutts blog was that Google was trying to fix this kind of problem (yes I know it's hard: http://aplawrence.com/Web/canonical_names.html ). So.. I shut off my redirects for a while to see what would happen, and I don't think it was good so I put them all back this morning: anything.aplawrence.com now redirects to just aplawrence.com I really don't think Google can "fix" this: if you have canonical names out there, I think YOU need to fix them with virtual hosts and redirects ( http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/googlepagerank301.html if you have no idea what I'm talking about). Am i wrong?
You are quite right. Google still has problems with this so you should always make sure there is only one version of a url. Its good practice, simple to do and there are no downsides to it.