Every year, we set a bunch of items in our item master to inactive (using the Inventory Wizard). These are matrix items, and although every item in the class may be inactive, the item class itself is still showing up on our item lookup. This is a real pain to search through. Some of these items are three or four years old, and may have the same or similar desctiption as a current item, which makes it confusing for our store managers. I don't want to delete the ItemClass record, since we use those records for a number of custom reports based on historical data.
I would make two suggestions: add an Inactive field to the Item Class table, so classes can be set to inactive in the same way as individual items, and expand the inventory wizard to allow data changes to be made on a class level (ex: change the inactive flag on a class, and it sets all items in that class to inactive. Similarly, change the matrix lookup code or class description on a class, and have that change reflected in every item in that class)