Can this be done with a friend list on Facebook?

I don’t think there is any way to exclude them from the total count of your friends. You can stop them from having access to certain parts of your profile though.

You can prevent them from seeing your wall if you want, so they won’t see status updates and other things you post.

I think you can do it a couple of ways. If you just want to block them from seeing status updates go to your profile page and click on the little lock where you would type a knew status, go to custom and exclude certain people from seeing updates as your default setting (I think it provides all of your friends and you just have to click on them, so should not take too long. Or go to privacy settings and prevent them from seeing everything.