Pete/Pat
It's AutoCAD E 2008, and thanks for your suggestions. Thanks for the offer, but it seems to make more sense to me now that I just name the layers as I want them to display in my wiring diagram, and select the wire type at the command prompt when I begin a new wire. I was working under the assumption before that I would select the working layer before drawing a new wire, so I wanted all wire layers to be grouped together, hence the "w_". So I'll just set my templates up with the layers that I need, named the way I'd like to see them in my WDs! Thanks for everything,
Nathan