Maybe it will amuse some of you that while trying to figure out how to work around Blender's insistence on ignoring poly groups, I'm pretty sure I just reinvented a trick I (and probably many others, too) used to use years ago:

- Via a script, change the material names to include the group names. So, for example, the polys in the abdomen actor have group "abdomen" and material "skin_BODY", so the script turns that into a material "abdomen:skin_BODY." The lips have group "head" and material "lips", so that becomes "head:lips."

- Edit the file in Blender.

- On the result OBJ, run a second script that restores the original material and group names.

Now that that's sorted, I can start doing little UV fixes with the confidence that I can get them from Blender back into Antonia's geometry file for Poser without bruising my brain in the process.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.