Hi Mark, also I think I have solution for the Blender problem for you.

The default Blender OBJ importer just seems to completely skip reading normals, but there is an alternate one I found on this page which does seem to actually read them in but accidentally throws them out at the very end by telling Blender to recalculate them.

I've modified that script (file named obj_io_modif232b.py attached below) to not do that recalculation at the end and with that set up it seems to bring in both normals and materials properly now.

To install this script, go to the Blender folder in c:\Program Files, and copy it into the .blender\scripts sub-folder.

After that inside of Blender there will be a new entry under File > Import, that says just plain "OBJ" (as opposed to "Wavefront (.obj)" which is the regular default import script). Hit the "Select Import" button that pops up to pick a file name and then "Done".

That seems like it may work - I tested this with Blender version 2.49a .

- Michael