Meshy Problem

Suddenly had a problem with my mesh when importing into UDK, it seemed that holes appeared in the mesh, after much back and forth I figured out the problem, in the import options in UDK there's an option named 'remove degenerates' which is switched on by default, it removes triangles or something even though theres NO triangles in my characters face, but anyway I digress, when switched off my character imports normally, except for some single polygons that looks unsmoothed, and when ticking the 'combine mesh' these hard polygons disappeared and things are looking rosy again.