Quote - MikeJ - do you know how the weights are associated with the geometry? Does the weigth informatino get stored with the bone, or with the vertex, or with the polygon? Or is the storage application dependent? I'm a total noob when it comes to weight mapping.

In LW you can select or create a vertex OR polygon group and assign a weight map to it, but I think it technically is only applied to vertices.
The bones are just bones, they don't have the weight info, but respond to the weight map you tell them to
When it comes to weighting materials however, naturally it's the polygons which are affected since points don't render.
But even there I believe it all comes down to vertices, which I think is what is actually being weighted, regardless of how it looks.
Everything comes back down to vertices, for that matter, except maybe for facet material information.
A weight map is essentially just a vertex map in the same way as a morph target or a UV map is.