Thanks for the detailed advice, I cant wait to try it.  Man, I tried to do a simple hula dance, and the entire figure looked like she was in a blender!  I take it all this is covered in the manual under IK chanis or something?  Is there a good tutorial here in renderosity about this?

As for the firefly animation thing, I had been doing what you said... It's the strangest thing.  I can render a single frame from any frame in the scene, but when outputting an animation as an AVI, It's all that poser brown-gray. 

Strangely, if I tell Poser to output it all as BMP's, all is well.  Also, If I use the Poser 4 renderer all is well.

On the cloth thing... Here's what I'm doing.

1. I created a Judy figure, and made a 400+ frame walk path.  the walk worked perfectly.
2. I added a dress, and went through the process to create a cloth sim, as I have many times before. 
3. I made sure to match the sim's framecount to the walk's.  I think it was 475 frames.
4. I gave it a drape of 20 frames
5. I hit "calculate simulation".

The calculator seemed to drape for about 5 frames, and even though it counted out the rest of the drape, nothing changed in the last 15 frames.

Then it started into calculating the animation.  It calcualted 3 frames and quit, like it was done.  I tried 20 or so times to get it to finish.

Hours later, I trashed the whole scene and started over.  This time, the drape happened just as before, and then the calculator just sat there for 30 minutes without ever reporting a single frame was finished.

Most software would actually report if it had encountered and error.   Most software would understand that 1, 2, 3 does not complete a loop of 475.  

So I guess if I ever want to do a short movie, I need to pick another program.  I guess Poser is only good for posing stills to export to a better renderer.  It's sad, really.

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As you can probably tell from my comments, I am an infrequent Poser user.  I'm not trying to make a career out oif it, I'm just trying to have some fun.