The main results of the paper are the following: 1. Every locally finite affine complete variety admits a near unanimity term; 2. A locally finite congruence distributive variety is affine complete if and only if all its algebras with no proper subalgebras are affine complete and the variety is generated by one of such algebras. The first of these results sharpens a result of McKenzie asserting that all locally finite affine complete varieties are congruence distributive. The second one generalizes the result by Kaarli and Pixley that characterizes arithmetical affine complete varieties.

We give a revised and updated exposition of the theory of full dualities initiated by Clark, Davey, Krauss and Werner, introducing the (stronger) notion of a strong duality. All known full dualities turn out to be strong. A series of theorems which provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a strong duality to exist is proved. All full dualities in the literature can be obtained from these results and many new strong dualities can be derived. In particular, we show that within congruence distributive varieties every duality can be upgraded to a strong duality. Amongst the new strong dualities are the dualities of Davey, Priestley and Werner for the varieties of pseudocomplemented distributive lattices which are either strong as they stand or can easily be made strong by the addition of partial operations to the dual structures.