Don, Tebop isn't attaching anything TO a hand - he's attaching the hand TO another object so that it follows it. To do that, IK is necessary.

tebop, the reason for the hand distorting when yo uparent it to the box is probably because you changed the scale parameters of the box prop, am I right? When parenting an object, the child takes on the scale changes of its parent.

As to whether Poser 6 contains some kind of bug to stop you from doing this, I couldn't say. I'll look into it at some point and let you know.

JonTheCelt