[Maya] Best ways to alter mesh AFTER paint weights, rigging, etc?

Turbopasta

I'm currently making modifications to a model that I made and rigged and painted weights on, and I'm wondering, let's say I want to go in and delete or add some edge loops, something simple like that, what would be the simplest way to do this? I think I did this once already, but I think it was a fluke and I can't figure out how to do it again. 

I would keep trying to figure it out through trial and error but my Maya keeps crashing when it gets confused with the skin weights, even if I unbind the mesh first, and then rebind. can anybody offer some tips on how to do this?

Mark Dygert

Maya Users: Copy your mesh and make your changes. Delete history and freeze transforms. Skin the mesh with default crappy skin and copy the weights from the old mesh. Test the deformation, if all is good, delete the old mesh.

3dsmax Users: You do the same thing except you apply skinwrap and convert to skin instead of reskinning.

Turbopasta

Thank you Mark. I think the big thing I learned here was that duplicate is not the same thing as copy. I never used copy since I thought duplicate was the same for some reason. I think I must have been using duplicate to try and achieve this result and I didn't know that doing copy brings over the skin weights as well, duplicate seems to only bring a mesh and absolutely nothing else.

After everything is confirmed to work, going into outline and deleting everything with "Pasted" in the title seems to do the trick for cleaning things up.