I have come up with a direction for getting things to work. The animation I talked about is above all a test. The reason I start in zero pose is to eliminate the poke through possiblities, basically so I can see that there is no overlap. Once I have my settings down I can go back and eliminate this from the animation. Yesterday I set up 155 frame walk designer animation with V3 and Judy's nehru coat. I kept running the first 30 frames and spinning dials til I got it to go all the way through. Basically using the dials to fix one crash at a time. Since the crashes happen only to cloth room (not poser itself) this was not too bad. I constrained and spun dials til my sim calc times per frame were at about 5 seconds each. I noticed that if my calc times were going above 45 seconds or so, this was a sign that the sim was working too hard and I was not going to get a good sim. After about three hours of this I got a great sim (having eliminated the self inforced 0 pose). Using the manual descriptions of what each dial does, I was able to make intelligent choices for each dial setting. Results: about 5 seconds of animation. Thanks to all for help and encouragement.