How to delete field from a managed solution

Hi,

I need to delete a field from managed solution in production environment , because an unused field was imported from dev by mistake. Are there ways to do it without affecting other fields and custimizations in production system?

               I have the updated version in dev environment now. If I delete the managed sol in production and again Import the updated version from dev to prod , will the data in managed solution be affected ? Because there are more than 5000 records in production ..or is there any other way to do it.

thanks