Extra shape nodes in maya

sprunghunt

I'm currently making some tools to cleanup empty shape nodes in maya. I know that the shape nodes are essentially containers for vertexes and so on but does anyone have any insight on why maya would create an empty shape node? 

Is there anything wrong with just deleting these shape nodes? They seem to cause a lot of problems.

throttlekitty

I'm not sure what operations can cause that, but there's no harm in deleting them. Just be sure to check that they have no connections.