Woa! Slow down there partner.. 1 post is enough.

I've done very little on the matter, but generally I've only seen the body mady up of 2 parts - the head/neck and the rest. I'm guessing you can do this because there's not much movement between the head and the shoulders so the issue of seperation wont exist.

I have however seen on occasions the modeller has 'cheated' and left the arms & legs as seperate to the trunk, though in these cases the place of junction is always covered by some loose fitting clothes.

Have a look at FreakyLowPoly part 0 and you'll see what I mean about covering the joints with loose clothing.

I guess what you need to do all depends on how far the limbs pull apart from the body and whether or not the character is intender to have clothes there. To be honest, I'd reccomend that you make the body a single, continuous mesh. The experience gained from connecting all the parts and getting the edges to flow smoothly from one to another simply can't be discounted. - I wouldn't use booleans for that step, for what it's worth. Do a combine and then manually get everything to line up.

Just like Kurt does in the _free_ caroon-dog and basic-human-form tutes. They're both invaluble imho.

-S.

EDIT: Never ever heard of using multiple skeletons in one model. Everything I've seen has one skeleton made up of all the joints necessary to animate the char. So, that'd be no parenting of bits and pieces together, it would also mean binding the whole lot together in one fell swoop.