Do I need to touch the wp_term table to rename category with same name?

I had two sub-categories with the same name (let’s call them abc and abc-2). Last weekend, I decided to restructure my categories and make use of the tags that come with WP 2.3.

So I deleted one of the same named categories and wanted to rename the first one from “abc-2” to “abc” (as the -2 doesn’t look so nice).

But WP is telling me that it can’t edit the category. When I checked the wp_term table I could still see the old category.

Doesn’t WP delete the categories in the database normally? Can I just delete the other category from the wp_term table?

Thx.