Question: Repeated solutions using solve

Part of my research involves finding solutions to polynomial equations in several variables. Presently, I'm using Maple to both generate and solve these systems. With what I'll call a particular type of system the solve function returns several solutions, one of which has a particular variable free and the others where this variable is the root of a polynomial. By finding the roots of the polynomial, I can see that these solutions simply correspond to the solutions where the parameter is free.

So I'm trying to understand why this happens. Using the option dropmultiplicity=true has no effect, and there are no other details that I could find in the documentation. This question is ill-posed, I know, but any help would be appreciated.