It's been my experience that turning off IK for both the figure and the object in question (boots in my case) seemed to fix the problem.  Ultimately, becasue it was impractical to always have IK turned off, I think I ended up offsetting the geometry for the boots before bringing into the Setup Room and rigging it by attaching the boots to the figures skeleton to compensate for the shift. 

There probably was a logical explanation for the behavior, but I just decided to work around it.

-hOss