Many thanks for the reply.

The reason for keeping the sold out items on display is because many of the products are pretty old/collectables and visitors say they like simply viewing the images even if they're not buying. With some categories having a fair number of sold items, it's come to the point where for people wishing to simply buy, the sold out items are getting in the way.

I guess the best solution is to make a new category called "archive" and when I go to the admin catelog and see items with 0 products, I can move these to the archive section. When I get sold items back in stock, I can then restock and move them back to their relevant category.

I was just wondering if there was an automatic way but thinking about it, manually wouldn't be too hard.