A new Blender 2.5 feature that might make your work a bit easier is vertex pinning. Blender3dArchitect’s Allan Brito explains it.
Allan writes:
Here is another article about new features of the upcoming Blender 3d 2.50, and this time I will talk about BMesh again. If you are not aware of what BMesh is, well it’s a new system to manage and manipulate mesh objects in Blender. The new system has a lot of enhancements and improvements compared with the way Blender deals with mesh objects today. It’s still in development, but we can take a look and test it based on some test builds available in graphicall.org. A new feature has been added to BMesh and it’s a pinning system to protect vertices from unwanted transformations.
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