ok i have tried several ways to get this to work,…but no dice. i make a mesh ( subsurfed or not,…tried both ways ) parent it to an armature using armature>> create from closest bones. then,…whether i use that mesh for the emmitor, or duplicate the mesh, and set that as an emmitor,…press ‘static’ and ‘animate’ and even recalc all a few dozen times,…but, though the mesh animates, the particles do not, either in the 3D window, or in the anim. Does anyone have any idea what I am or am not doing to cause this? I can put up a blend if it would help, or if someone else who has succeded with this could,…I would really appreciate it. a search revealed only that a couple of other people were experiencing the same thing. any help would sure be appreciated.
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here’s one of the blends i made. it does not work. 
http://home.att.net/~yorik/ahairtest1exp.blend
ok basse figured it out,…“face” must be pressed.
Okay, I’m having the same problem, but I’ve got ‘face’ pressed and it still doesn’t work.
Did you try rendering? It doesn’t update automatically in the 3D window. Also if you try the blend i put up, be sure to change the render path in the render buttons, or it might crash. Also, i think i may have added a new emittor mesh and deleted the old one at somem point, though i don’t know if it would make a difference.
Okay, I downloaded your test blend and rendered it with the ‘face’ option on and things worked out fine. I think I’ve figured out what the “problem” is for my case.
My setup was a bit different. I was roughly following the static particles section from the online blender manual: http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/htmlI/x9318.html#section_particles_static
What I had was a hairy sphear. I added a negative force on the z-axis to the setup so that the “hair” pointed toward the ground–the overall effect kinda looked like a Tina Turner wig from Beyond Thunderdome ;).
I inserted a key at frame 1, went to frame 25, rotated my object 90 degrees and inserted another key. When I rendered my whole Tina Turner wig just rotated like one big solid lump of plastic. What I expected was that roots of the hair would move with the spear and that the hairs would continue to droop towards the ground, instead it just drooped toward the negative z-axis of the object.
The next thing I tried was to remove the force from the particle setup and add a plane with a force field below the wig. This achieved the same droop that I’d had before, but the hope was it would animate correctly. Unfortunately my whole wig just rotated again.
Theorizing that static particle recalculation is based on mesh deformations and not object scaling/rotation/location I modified my setup to perform the rotation as a relative vertex key (also removed that force field and added the force back to the particle setup). With this setup the particles did actually sort of bend like fibers, but didn’t exactly behave like what I would expect from hair. The tips of the hair seem to have this tendency to stay in one place, so the effect is more like swirling spagetti on a plate.
All of this this starts to make sense when I remember that this isn’t an actual fiber simulation, these are particles: we’re sumulating ideal particles moving according to very simplified physical rules. Of course the emitter position doesn’t have a damned bit of effect on the position of already emitted particles; it can only affect the position of the particle that it is currently emitting.
At any rate, I still haven’t completely groked the whole particle thing, but I think I’m getting closer. I’m assuming that everything I’ve observed is expected behavior. Anyone know any differently?