Regarding the question what is an .al file. I ran into these a couple of weeks
ago too. All I could come up with was "activestate library". Any file extension experts
that can verify?
...the majority is always wrong, and always the last to know about it...
Follow the link in my other reply in this thread. ".al" stands for "AutoLoad" and is used by AutoLoader (and maybe other similar modules).
Did you try super searching for ".al" ? super search has its problems, but I like that it has no problems searching for punctuation. Anyway, it finds some useless hits (people saying "...also," and such) but also some good hits.