The author expounds the notion of supported blow-up and applies it to study the renowned Nirenberg/Kazdan-Warner problem on $S^n$. When $n \ge 5$ and under some mild conditions, he shows that blow-up at a point with positive definite Hessian has to be a supported isolated blow-up, which, when combined with a uniform volume bound, is a removable singularity. A new asymmetric condition is introduced to exclude single simple blow-up. These enable the author to obtain a general existence theorem for $n \ge 5$ with rather natural condition.