John, you are absolutely correct wrt file renaming. In my previous post i was not clear enough. I do not intend to rename existing files. For several reasons i made a decision to use a slightly different filenaming convention as of january 1, 2012.
My own workflow within LR is primarely supported and controlled by keywords, virtual copies, smart collections, collections an collection sets. Filenames have little role in this concept, but are of importance on OS - more precisely on file system- level, regardless of how LR is used. Whatever filenaming convention one prefers will work, as long as you take into account the realm in which this has to provide uniqueness to a file (as well as the limitations of total pathlength imposed by the file systems used).
Wrt to files being used outside of the control of Lightroom: that is exactly the reason for me for removing the hyphens.