database full of missing entries for podcast episodes

[frankenpod]

I think I've asked about this before, but I somehow managed to fix it, but the problem keeps coming back.

If I delete unwanted (or corrupted) podcast episodes, quite frequently MM won't cleanly delete them, but instead replaces them with an entry with an "unknown" location. In the case of corrupted podcast downloads this then stops me from redownloading them, because the 'unknown path' entry seems to get in the way of the downloadable entry that links to the podcast feed.
My podcast listings keep clogging up with these null entries.

I somehow fixed it before by using some free tool to edit the MM database and laboriously delete all the entries with null file locations. But I can't now find whatever tool it was I used that time. I am assuming the MM.db file is the database, but I can't figure out how to open it to edit it (even though I managed to do so in the past, have forgotten how I did it).

What free utility is suitable to open that database and remove those bad entries? Tried Libreoffice "base" but can't work out how to open MM.db with it.

Alternatively, if I simply deleted the database would MM rebuild it cleanly from scratch, or would I lose important stuff?

The 'optimise database' tool doesn't seem to have any effect on the problem.

Why does this happen anyway? Sometimes if I delete a podcast (usually because it's gotten corrupted in downloading, with missing or scrambled tags or something) it just goes away cleanly, as it should. But very often it instead leaves these 'dead' entries.

(MM4 gold 4.1.30.1914)

(When I say I delete a podcast, I mean from within MM itself, not from Explorer)

Thanks.

[frankenpod]

This is not really an issue for MM in particular, but I do wish there was a generally-agreed standard for exporting auto or smart playlists, as there is for normal playlists. Seems as if clearing out the database to start again would lose all the smart playlists (of which I have zillions).

[Lowlander]

Tools > Options > Downloads/Podcasts and disable 'show removed episode links'. Does that not do the trick?

Did you delete the episodes from MediaMonkey or from File Explorer?

[frankenpod]

They were deleted from within MM itself.
Yes, if I uncheck that button the missing links are no longer shown. If I do that though, it then doesn't list them as available to be downloaded again. Seems as if the null links are still in the database, but doing that suppresses displaying them. Which is an improvement, granted, but still isn't doing what I'd expect.

[frankenpod]

Possibly the issue is because of deleting episodes that are no longer available from the podcast server. But I don't want to risk deleting things in order to experiment to confirm that.