[Swampdude]

With Autocad, if you install express tools (which comes with the later versions, but can be found on their website) there's a layers menu that has a delete layer script, that will completely eliminate those pesky layers and anything on them. It seems like an obvious need but for some reason they've never incorporated that option, hence needing to delete then purge all items. It gets more complicated if you have items frozen in viewports. Then you can't purge even if no items exist using the particular layer.