But also - these issues were fixed for Blender 2.49 with Anthony's work.

He implemented an importer that would load the vertex normals in (forum thread here), and also at one point made a custom Blender build that would not throw away the normals for rendering (forum thread here).

However, the old import script does not work anymore with the new Blender version, and the patched version is an older version.

So those previous workarounds do not really help for the latest Blender release.

It's just too bad that it's not fixed up directly in the main Blender version instead of needing workarounds in the first place...

- Michael