This is something I hadn't realized was even a potential problem until I recently was digging around on my own friends list and saw a bunch of these:

Definitely not good! The way you can eliminate them is to go to your MySpace profile, then click on "[Edit Friends]" immediately adjacent to the "My Friend Space" link:

Now you'll probably see some of your friends are, like my own, deleted:

Not good. To delete them, simply check the little box underneath each one, then click on the "Delete Selected Friends" button. Do this for each page of friends you have (I have 53, sheesh!) and you'll be clean and fixed up.

Unfortunately, while there are different ways you can limit the subset of friends displayed (for example, only comedians, in case you just happen to have lots of 'em as friends) there doesn't seem to be any shortcut to just displaying -- or deleting -- deleted friends. So it is going to be a bit of a tedious task to accomplish.

Each time you select one or more friends to delete, you'll be asked if you're sure:

Say yes, go to the next page, delete the additional deleted friends, and, finally, you'll be in the clear.