I understand how to drape say a dress onto V3 in a standing pose and it looks great. My question is how do I get her from there to sitting on the ground in an animation.
When I set the final frame and go through the process in the cloth room in P7,
1/ how do I strip out the frames I wish to use in my animation?
2/ Can the cloth simulation be saved out for later use?
3/ Do I have to begin every render from a standing pose - clothroom sim - final pose - clothroom sim kinda format?

It takes me so long to set everything up I dont want to waste a lot of my evenings "experimenting" fun though it is, I need to know I'm using the correct method from the off.
The Poser manual is very basic in as much as it is great for individual renders but nothing more complex.
Thank you all so much

If you use the "drape from zero pose" option in the simulation settings, you don't need to start your animation from the T-pose. However many users prefer the additional control that comes from draping that way. If you need to start your animation from zero, just render out the frames you want to use. You do render to individual image files, don't you? ;) Many users do this. It enables you to restart if Poser crashes half way through, or if you run out of time and have to cancel the rendering. Also, you get more control (there's that word again) over the way your movie is assembled and encoded. When you save the scene, the dynamics information is saved with it (in a file with a .dyn extension). So there's no need to re-run the simulation unless you change the pose.

About #3: the sequence I usually use for animations is the following:

Frame 1: T-pose
Frame 20-30: starting pose (10 frames to allow the cloth to settle)
Frame 30-xxx: animation

When rendering to a movie (including rendering as a series of stills), it's easy to specify the start and end frame, I just let the rendering start at frame 30.

Thats great guys, as ever thank you for your help.
that's my weekend planned :)

The last short anim I did (cemetry gates opening) I saved as individual files, althougn I have yet to use it as a real stand alone animation.

svdll, which program do you use to tie the single image files together as an animation? 

I usually do only short test animations and let Poser save to .AVI format (MPEG4 or DivX codec usually works best)
There's a lot of free software out there to stitch a series of stills together into a movie. I seem to remember that VirtualDub does this kind of job very well.

I'd been wondering the same thing after trying an animation with
dynamic cloth.  Starting from frame 1 didn't seem to work at all.

Thanks for spilling the secret!