Cleaning up noisy vocal tracks

I have a few hundred vocal tracks to clean up, ie: room noise, lip smacks, coughs, etc. in between the actually singing. Right now I am manually going through eacj track and putting silence where I want it. Strip silence is not the best, as there are coughs, etc. that would be above the setting and it's hard to be accurate so as not to lose subtle beginnings and endings.
So...any suggestions that could save me days of cleaning the tracks up manually.
BTW, I am not mixing the tracks. I am importing them to Pro Tools at another studio and having them do it, so I can't just throw a gate on them.
Thanks!

What Jim said and...
What I do is instead of cutting the track completely to quiet it, is I used the features in Logic to reduce the level of the part of a track way way down. So even if there is a lip smack, I focus on that and take down the amplitude until I can barely hear it with the track soloed. It's not total quiet, you won't hear it in the mix and you don't get the super quiet of killing the sound.
Second, on your breaths, like Jim said don't take them out, however, listen to the volume of the breath as compared to the vocals, sometimes the breath is louder than the first word, so again turn down the volume of the breath so it sounds more natural as part of the sound, and second be sure that your breaths are on beat. I know this sounds crazy, but if you listen to CDs there are breaths in all vocals, but they're on beat, if they're not then you'll hear that and they will throw you off, the breaths become part of the beat of the song. If the breath is off, move it left or right depending on how far off it is.
There is no shortcut to what you're trying to do. Put in the time to get the right result. once you get going, you'll find a grove. I can edit a 4 minute song now (2 tracks of vocals) in about 5 mins. Just find the technique that works and apply the effect to it.
The other thing you want to keep in mind is that while YOU may not want to put a gate on it, the engineer in the other studio can and will put one on if a track is a bit noisy, so just get it good/great enough for him to work with. Let him/her do his/her job And since it sounds like you're going in a real high end studio, the gate they have I'm sure will be good enough
If you do too much you might end up making the engineer's life harder!
R

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Cleaning up noisy vocal tracks

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