Much appreciated Dan!
I do tend to make things complex and I may need to revisit the methodology on this one.
But as to getting a method to create a dumb component you have brought me to this, which serves the current purposes.
def self.regroup
model = Sketchup.active_model
active = []
ents = model.active_entities
model.active_entities.each {|e| active << e}
grp = ents.add_group(active)
inst = grp.to_component
end