Thank you, oh mighty Bloom, keeper of vast meshing knowledge, for your fast response.  However, being the moron that I am, your suggestion did not work.  When I selected the verts around the neck and hit normal date merge, the neck area turned into this:  

, which looks even funkier in BodyShop.  The vertex data merge collapsed everything to a single point.  Is that something that I need to do at the very beginning, before I save or export the mesh?  Also, is there anyway you could dumb the process down a bit more for my benefit?  

  Thanks again.