Thanks for your quick answer

Yeah, well explode is a big (and wrong) word which I have used - it's just a narrow gap between Polygons - this is not an issue if I do keep things in a reasonable size (close to the original importing size, which I measured in meters within 3ds max, to keep things at a real scale); so the probplem is avoidable if I work very carefuly within WED. However - those Smoothing Groups are clearly visible within the editors. I pressume its about the phong shading. Anyway... hard edge lighting brings those edges up again (can't be eliminated with smoothing texture option I think), which is the common omni lighting of GS - so smoothing groups are useless anyway I pressume (I've exported the mesh with max in various formats at very high vertex precision - so things actually are consistent).

I am sorry if I sounded too frustrated, but... If you invest lots of hours with those basic features without getting close to a solution... it's ruin the day, ya know?

Maybe it's possible to get a workaroung with some extra shading code... have to get into this