After removing a distro installed version of SLIME, my MELPA (stable) installed SLIME version still insists on accessing the old system wide swank-loader.lisp.
How do I purge the system and reset the path to swank-loader.lisp
Based on advise from the #LISP IRC channel (thank you user madrik). The following did in fact solve the problem:
sudo apt purge slime
Merely "removing" SLIME using apt remove slime was not enough, however purging the program did remove the configuration files and solved the problem.