Neither of those ideas work, though your point about several .obj files was valid. 

It led me to clear out and start again and I found that it is a UVMapper failure - going through the process, Poser will accept the texture map produced as .bmp (or .jpeg) and happily apply it to any other prop or figure in the runtime. But any texture you pick fails to apply to the sword.

The logical conclusion is that UVMapper is not mapping and/or saving anything to the .obj, even though it implies it is - no error message,freeze or anything.

I will go to that part of the forum and see if anyone there can find my mistake