Randy - My own obsessive compulsiveness has about reached a saturation point, and I probably won't spend more time trying to make sense of the mysteries, especially at this early hour of the morning - but one thing I know for sure because I dealt with it three years ago when I wanted to suppress the WELCOME message is that the obsolete templates were from a prior version of ListServ, and the version 16 templates refer back to them for the coding they contain.

And I've found this in my archived emails -perhaps this message exchange I had with Ben three years ago helps to clarify issues somewhat? Note that in order to effectively suppress the WELCOME message I had to delete the obsolete version, using an "empty put" procedure.
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From: Ben Parker <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: mail templates
Date: August 12, 2013 at 6:09:00 AM PDT
To: Charles Clausen <[log in to unmask]>

On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 01:58:00 -0700, Charles Clausen <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

I've revised our prostate list website at ppml-info.org, and have been intending to set things up so that new subscribers do not receive the [WELCOME] message, and are just referred to our subscription info webpage by the prior [$SIGNUP] message. I have revised the latter, and this revision is working o.k., but I've been unable to figure out how to suppress the [WELCOME] message. I entered ".QQ" at the top of both the obsolete and new templates. and deleted the text we had in the obsolete message, but when I subscribe with an alternative email address (at Yahoo), the Welcome message is still sent out, containing the ".QQ".

Ben's reply:

You shouldn't have both the obsolete and new welcome message.  The obsolete
welcome (and farewell) message is actually a separate file.  In this file,
everything is valid content, and no variable substitutions are allowed and
none of the usual '.' commands work either. The only way to prevent it being
sent is to delete the file completely.  

So edit it, remove all content, everything, including the Subject: line and
save that.  Saving a totally blank file has the effect of deleting the file.
It is known as an 'empty-put'  

The new welcome message is stored in the PROSTATE.MAILTPL template file.  This
allows variable sustitutions (&LISTNAME, etc.) and '.' commands (.QQ, etc.)

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