Freely braided elements in Coxeter groups, II

We continue the study of freely braided elements of simply laced Coxeter groups, which we introduced in a previous work (math.CO/0301104). A known upper bound for the number of commutation classes of reduced expressions for an element of a simply laced Coxeter group is shown to be achieved only when the element is freely braided; this establishes the converse direction of a previous result. It is also shown that a simply laced Coxeter group has finitely many freely braided elements if and only if it has finitely many fully commutative elements.