I see no reason not to tweak host.execute to take an additional optional "clearoutput" parameter (defaulted to True), and then use that...
Silly me: there already is an optional "home" parameter that if set to False, just just what you want! (4th param)
And I've tried following your steps for the remblock, but it works fine here!!! Is this on WinXP? Wonder if it's worth us swapping compiled EXEs?