it's a good bet that a majority of the rest of 3D software in the world will barf trying to read these illeagally formatted files. Maybe, maybe not. I have no way of judging "the rest of the 3d world." I can only look at the software I've tried out using my files to play with the tools in that software. Normally I don't hand edit vn lines out of a file though I have done, uvmapper does that perfectly well. But, with Softimage, Cinema4D, Bryce 4 and 5, Poser 3 and 4, Messiah, Maya, and a couple others I can't recall off-hand they did not barf at all. Loaded the object file and it looked just like it did in any other app that I tried. Whether there are apps that hate missing normals exists, I haven't found it yet. No doubt there's at least one, maybe more out there somewhere. shrug