This sort of relates to another question I asked but I thought this may be the solution if I can do this.. is there a way to sort of “clean up” an imported high poly object? It was started with nurbs and converted to polygon in another program and now when I try to make this into a rigid body or particle the simulations never finish (normally they finish fairly fast for me)..

I am guessing that there are some things that houdini is seeing wrong with the models I am importing so I've thought if there were a way for houdini to sort of scan the object and look for spots that could be cut out, etc to make it a cleaner model this would help.

Depends what you mean by cleanup but you can use polyreduce to reduce polys, a pointsop to add/modify normals, a fuse sop to fuse points and a facet to adjust edginess.

Also check out the Clean SOP.