> Can anyone kindly help me to understand, once and for all, the
> difference between the Factory design pattern and the Abstract Factory
> design pattern.

There is an objective reason for this uncertainty:

The examples you find for them for example in C# are very bad because
they are not taken out of a real project.

I can use the factory method for example to replace a switch statement
when I refactor. I have not yet encountered a situation to use an
abstract factory pattern.

The danger here is overengineering.

There is a quite good explanation at
http://jamesthornton.com/eckel/TIPat...Chapter06.html

Klaus