My Contacts app has 100's of duplicate groups, is it possible to mass delete?

My Contacts app has 100's of duplicate groups, is it possible to mass delete?
These groups are a legacy of over a decade of mis-syncs (starting with Palm's crappy software, and then multiple simultaneous iTunes syncs). The app is so slow it's useless, and the database problem causes issues with my iOS devices too (a contact can take a over minute to save after editing).
I can delete the groups, but it takes about two minutes each (multiply that by hundreds )
I've found several "contacts cleaners" apps, but none remove duplicate groups.
I'm thinking that I might be able to export the entire database and edit it manually, but I don't know what steps to take.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
Chas

Hey Linc,
Just in case anybody has searched this thread for a similar problem: taking all contacts out of the Contacts app doesn't erase groups: all my thousands of erronous groups remain (and still take up to a minute to delete each one, grrr).
I've gone into the XML files that make up the contacts database and I painstakingly deleted every file that was one of the offending groups. I thought that that should have solved my problem but, when I replaced all the files in the relevant place in the System, all those thousands of groups were still there in the Contacts app. I'm stumped :-( It could be that the database was repopulated by what was up on iCloud, but in that case I'm not sure how to consolodate everything so that one source propagates to the others (it's all complicated by the fact that my phone hasn't been sharing contacts that were created on it with iCloud, so I can't just erase it). Ahh, gotta love multi-variate problems!
Thanks again for the help, I do appreciate it.
Chas

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