Simplex is the default setting for when AutoCAD can't find the right font. You can change it to anything you want, even TTFs. Go to Options, Files , Text Editor, Alternate Font File.

The easiest way to get rid of extra junk is the purge command. Do it a few times to get rid of nested junk. It won't get rid of everything though. Sometimes if I have a dwg that has far too much junk, I wblock what I want out and then recreate my paperspace in the new drawing.

The new ACAD's ability to do color fills is great, but has one drawback. When creating PDFs from AutoCAD the file sizes can get unruly. I was just shown a feature in Acrobat the other day that shrinks the sizes down. In Acrobat go to File, Reduce File Size. Apaprantly it was also available in 6.0. If only I'd known about that feature before, it would have saved me many headaches trying to deal with huge PDFs. Hope this helps.

Here's a tiny piece of the last color elevation I did to give you an idea what the newer AutoCAD versions are capable of. Remember this is just a quick and dirty elevation using nothing but the hatch command in ACAD.

All my lineweights are identical to the elevation drawings I started with before adding the color since they are in the 0-255 range. I did make amistake on this one though in that I some of my lines are hidden behind some hatches. The best way to fix that is to isolate all the color hatches and use the 'send to back' command which used to be in express tools and seems to get moved with every new release of ACAD. (My latest version has it only accessible from right click.)

2006 is now out. The leap from 2000 to 2006 is pretty large. I beta tested 2006 for 4 months before it released. If/when you decide to upgrade I'd be happy to answer any questions.

-Steve G.