Unfortunately the purge tool has other issues. For instance, if teams are purged the leaderboards screen replaces team names with %t, like so:
Which is somewhat of a gamebreaker for me (although I can still see who the player played for/against in the players BNN page). The purge tool does seem to fix the vast majority of the errors I get, although I only seem to get them at around 89% when saving (and even then it's relatively intermittent; say every 3 or four saves) or when loading the "List all players" screen which again is only intermittent.