3DS Max Shader Deleting

Hey,

I know this isn't a programming question really, but there didnt' seem to be a section I could find that was just "software" related. I saw some that said " don't post software!" questions but none that say "go ahead!"

Anyways hopefully theres some 3dsmax users out here, my background is 2-3yrs of Maya and nearly a year of 3dsmax.

I have a scene thats basically ****ed, it has a lot of duplicate shaders assigned to multiple objects. In example theres over 40 shaders of "basic metal". The idea is im taking all the objects those are assigned to and putting them on 1 basic metal. However it seems 3dsmax still has the unused shader sitting in my scene. I can't seem to right click and delete.. its shaded out. I also use the Outliner plugin (to make it feel more like maya). It also have a section with shader lists, but the delete is also shaded out.


Why is it so hard to delete a shader? even when nothing is assigned to it ? the only thing i can find that works is MatClean but it whipes the entire scene of every material.


Hopefully we have some experienced max users floating around

Cheers

my background is primarily maya as well, though i used to use max a few years ago...
can you copy all the pieces of your scene and paste them into a new file?
have you looked on cgtalk?