Quote - I was working on daz 3d's lost realms and only had the character in the scene and had posed the arms, head and mertail as I wanted the mertail to go to the side and back a bit so that I could hopefully find a clam shell prop to be able to use to pose her as kneeling inside the open clam shell.   I hope that makes sense.  It's quite possible that I did pose her awkward for poser as I'm learning all this and as you mentioned, a glitch someplace possibly occurred when saving it. 

I have a paint shop pro tube  that is in png format of a clam shell that I'd like but it's 2d and I can't find any way to bring it into poser to be able to pose her in the open shell. 

I had nothing else open at the time other than poser and wasn't online.   I have 2 320 gb internal hd's  ,  3gb ram,  Intel  core 2 quad processor,  Vista Premium,   I still have 231 gb free on the c drive and 249 gb free on the E drive.  

I will  begin all over again and save it and see if all goes well this time. 

The only way I can figure something happening as you describe is when you have the wrong camera selected. If you have a hand camera selected and you turn a dial the camera viewpoint may change, some other cameras have similar behavior. Make sure you always have the main camera selected. Whatever strange pose you use Poser will make no difference; if you save a scene it will always reload as saved (but do note what camera you were using).

A 2d picture can be used in Poser as a background picture (this may create several problems) or as a texture on a prop (a cube of the correct size is often used for this). Be warned that combining a 2d picture with 3d figure rarely works out well. It is difficult to get the lighting and shadows right. You are better of looking for a 3d shell (I'm not into that type of picture so I can't help you there).

Work slowly towards your goal. You have to learn to crawl before you can start running. Begin with the character, pose an arm, save, terminate poser and start again with loading the saved scene. Now try this with a leg (and find out that IK is creating problems). Then load the mertail and use as per instructions (these vary depending on the mertail). This is often a separate character (meaning the posing camera will appear to jump around). Pose this correctly. Render and notice the lights are probably not to your liking. Play with this until you begin to understand how this works. Then bring in the shell. Get everything looking right and render.
Now its time to add a background and all other elements to build a complete scene. If you're still hanging around by this time, you have probably been bitten by the 3d bug and spare time is bound to be in short supply from now on.

Good luck