Reviewing the Patent

IE 8 doesn't support TIFF either, but the free ActiveX plug-in that the Patent site mentions worked for me. Once I have copies on my machine, I can view them with any number of built-in utilities, of course.

The amended claims do fit. Also, the revision to claims 3 and 5 close a loophole in the wordings that would have had the claims apply to access to the same-hash list for any purpose whatever, rather than only "accessing the linked list of records to search for a target record."

Unless covered by some other patent, it would appear that having a separate process that scans buckets for the sole purpose of scavenging automatically-expired records is not covered, so long as it does not involve the "record search means" for finding a record by its key.