I should have remembered this earlier. You can't prevent Blender from adding the numerical suffixes. Each object and material must have a unique name, otherwise the suffixes will be appended when encountering an object or material with an identical name. Sure, you can copy materials from one object or a select number of polys to other geometry, but the names must remain unique. It's like to trying to have two files with the same name in the same directory. If that was allowed to happen, neither Blender or you would know what was what.