The Swatch tab will show you what you set it to show. If you want only 7 colors to show, you have to edit it to show only those 7 colors. Don't know much about using palettes in the way you're wanting..... sorry.

I'm not using version 9, but I don't think it's very different from version 8.10......
To 'empty' the Swatch tab, first I would set it to only display 'color' only (no gradients, patterns, or textures)On the bottom right of the Material palette there's a button to set what the Swatch tab displays.
Then you click on each color swatch and delete it (use the Trash icon button) until the they are all gone.
Now left click the Foreground color box, the Materials dialog pops up. Mouse over the color in the image you want to add, and left click, then use the "Add to swatches" button. Do this until you have all your colors set.
Hope that helps.......... if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Your confusing a Swatch, with the Swatch Tab. Swatches are the indiviual colors available inside the Swatch tab/window.
I have all my favorite gradients, as well as colors setup this way.

sigh...no it doesn't work like that. phhht.

See, that's what I thought a pallette was: you could choose which colors you wanted to work with and save them as a group with a name which could be called up later. This seems like such an essential thing to have in a painting program, I'm not sure why there isn't one. You can name and save combinations of presets in an effect to call up at a later time, why not sets of colors. It's a mystery

Right, I understand that now. When I looked at palettes the help file said that a pallette was the collection of colors at a specific color depth. 16m color depth has no pallete, because it's made up of all the colors your monitor can display, or some such thing. It doesn't seem as though there is anyway to save a collection of colors as a file and call it up on demand. Oh well, off to the Jasc forums for a suggestion.