At first it seemed that in this thread there were two issues:

1. A light following the character
2. A particle emitter following the movement of the girl's hand.

I was addressing the first issue. The Track modifier will "track" the object as it moves, instead of "pointing" at it as the Point At modifier would do. You simply select Track from the same list that Point At is on and choose the object you want to track, that's pretty much it. It definately gives you different results than the Point At modifier.

Now as far as the second issue, I must agree with Mark that if you make the emmitter a child of any part of the character it will move with that part of the character. Something the folks confuse is Grouping and making Parent-to-Child hierarchies, because the set-up is so similar. 

If you group (Edit>Group or Ctrl+G) an object with other objects that does not gurantee that they will move as desired. In order for this to work you must make the emitter a child of the hand, some part of the hand, or a prop on the hand. To make the emitter a child of the hand simply drag it onto the hand or prop object in the Instances tab of the Properties tray.

I have Poser 7 because I just go through writting an article on it. I dont think that Carrara 5 imports Poser 7 data, otherwise I would try it myself. Maybe you can post your exported Poser animation (the sample) in Carrara format, that way we can play with it.

Mike