Anyone know a way to globally delete contact records in FE? The majority of ours have dups and we'd like to start with a clean slate.

There is not a way to globally delete contact records, only globally change them.  Unfortunately the clean up will me manual, but you can create a query for projects or grants with the contact information.  This will allow you to quickly identify records with duplicates and update them without opening each individual record. 

When you create the query, you will need to create one for projects and a separate for grants, if you use them.  Here are the steps for the project query; you can replace the work project with grant for the grant query.  On the Criteria tab, select Contacts, Name, and operator not blank.  On the Output tab, select project and then Project ID.  On the Sort tab, select Project, Project ID.  The results tab will list the all projects with contacts in project ID order.  This will allow you to quickly identify the projects with more than one contact and you can compare the contact names to see if they are duplicated.  You can double click on the result row to open the record and delete the duplicate.  To move to the next record in the query form the open record, click the single right arrow.  You will be prompted to save the changed before moving to the next record.