Is this even possible?  It seems that once a key is inserted, there is no way to remove it from the hash_map.

I can erase() the entry, but that does not eliminate the key.  Instead it replaces the associated object with a default-constructed object under the same key.  Keys never go away!

I want to eliminate key/entry pairs *entirely* from an STLport hash_map.  How?

Mark

My bad.  It is possible.  The code I'm dealing with uses an auxiliary STL structure containing just the keys, so a second erasure was necessary.