Alan you are spot on, we WANT to blow it all out because:
We have a master template with all of our styles, layers, etc in 1 .dwt for civil 3d... we want to open the template for say a grading drawing, and delete all the layers that are not pertinent to a grading drawing, so this is perfect except that i'm a noob programmer... landscape architect/hack programmer you get the idea.
any help would be good, the concept is to have the external txt file for the lisp to "lookup" so we can always update it without editing the "lisp".
cheers