Commiting SEO Suicide?

I currently have my links setup as the default (/forumname/0000-threadtitle-page.html) which it has been ever since I installed VBSEO.

However, I would now like to change it to (/forumname/threadtitle-0000/) as I believe it gives better readability. (ie it's a nice read from start to finish, with the numbers all kept at the end, instead of bunched in the middle) and it also could save a DB query (ie if a thread title ends with a number, then VBSEO has to check if this is a page change, or part of the actual title)

So two questions -

1) Will vbseo automatically redirect my old format urls?
2) Is this likely to hurt my search engine rankings at all?


Many thanks

Ben

1) Yes
2) Most likely.

Thanks Keith - do I need to edit anything special to make it do the redirects?

Also, I assume it would 301 the user to the right place, thus it shouldn't take too long to reindex in Google?

I should clarify that #1 will require a custom .htaccess entry.