Is there an easy way to remove PPAs from the repos so synaptic doesn't see them at all?
Yes, surely. Just launch Synaptic and visit Settings > Repositories menu.
You can, but you may also need to remove the packages belonging to this PPA. And this process may be difficult in the Synaptic as you may need to Force Version for several packages if they exist in both PPA (newer versions) and in official repositories (older versions).
The simple unchecking the PPA in the Settings → Repositories, Other Software will make packages from this PPA obsolete, it may cause problems in the future.
So I would suggest to use ppa-purge from the terminal to remove PPA with its packages from the system:
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:ppa-owner/ppa-name
will remove packages from the PPA (or downgrade them to the versions from official/other repositories) and then remove the PPA from /etc/apt/sources.list.d.
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I don't see PPAs mentioned in Synaptic--?settings-->repo sub menu.
Thanks, I'll try the purge method.
I'm trying to remove any PPAs from the future so that Synaptic doesn't install them.