You could always group the objects like you would put them in layers, then hide and unhide the object groups. Hell if you wanted to you could setup, like you said, a mel script to handle hiding and unhiding the group, that way you could drag and drop what you need into and out of the group without worrying about anything…
Yeah, hiding and showing work fine - it's just I wish the layers worked. The file I'm working on is very complex so I need to be able to quickle toggle sets of things off and on. Maybe I'll have to write a couple quick mel scripts tyo show and hide what I want. Anywy, thanks guys.