As you have mentioned that the recovery model is simple, so I believe yes. But I have never done that. But I have used sp_repldone and worked as expected. But before that I checked if the Log growth was really being caused by replication by running following command..

select log_reuse_wait,log_reuse_wait_desc from sys.databases

If there is something for replication then sp_repldone solves the issue.

Sorry I was not much help.