Many thanks Didier.
You have saved me a lot of time

As you noticed I am new to the forum (thanks for the welcome) and I am having difficulites the sketchup terminology.

I will try explaining the problem in another way:
The user selects several components and builds the first part of a frame. He then copies these components and pastes them to expand the framework. Sometimes he overlaps the existing components with the pasted copy hence he has the two of the same components sharing the same origin. In order to accurately price up the framework I need to remove the duplicate component as in real life I cannot put more than one component in the same place.
Hope that helps.

Hi
I am try to find a way to locate duplicate component instances and then deleting all but 1 instance by just using ruby.
The defintion of duplicate is where two or more of the same component definition have the exactly the same origin.
Thanks for any suggestions.