Cloth stops running if SkinnedMeshRenderer disabled

Hi There
I am trying to add a system to Unity that allows for a complex mesh to be driven by a simple cloth and I pretty much have it working except for one problem when I disable the SkinnedMeshRenderer on the Cloth object it stops the cloth simulation, is there a way to disable the SkinnedMeshRenderer and have the cloth simulation continue to run?

Another question the Cloth SkinnedMeshRenderer and the mesh do not have any bones, bindposes, weights etc. is there a way to find the bone info being used by the cloth as it would save me duplicating the data and having to recalculate the transforms for the bones.
Chris