rigging issues

after i had made the initial rig, there were several things wrong with it that i had to go back an sort out. once the first rig had been done, the next step was to exclude all the verts that were being influenced by widgets that shouldn't have been moving it, such as near the arm of my character, when you moved it up and down, there were parts of the chest and neck that was being moved aswell. so to fix that you have to exclude the verts using set up machine, so thats what i had been doing, i excluded all the body parts that were influencing things it shouldnt be, apart from the fingers and toes. i left the model at that point on friday, so it took me from tuesday to thurseday to rig it, then till friday to exclude the verts.  but on monday i discoverd that there wasnt enough mesh in the fingers to help define the exclusions, as when i did it, the fingers were still picking up influence anyway and being moved.  the same was also true for the feet, and i also had to add more of a space between the toes to help them deform. this is what i found out on monday. so today i went back to before i rigged the model, and i put in all the extra edge loops around the joints. i needed to put 3 loops around each one to make sure that when it bends it deforms nicely. which was easy to do as i have saved over 70 versions of both the model and the rigging process!!  so the rigging is once again done....for what must be over the 20th time, ive excluded the verts for both arms and the head.  all thats left for me to do is do the same for the legs and stomach, which wont take very long at all. also paul told me that you dont exclude the fingers or toes, or very rarely as there often quite tricky to do, so thats almost always left up to the paint weighting, which is the next stage after the exclusions. so by the end of today, i will have excluded everything,and i can then move on to paint weighting!!...hopefully, then i can move onto the face rig.