ok utter frustration.
I am working with the v4 body suit. I made a texture for it and of course when I go in to try and set all the lovely settings(highlight etc) I have to go through each bloody part of that whole list on the body suit.
When I DO try and use the "shift and click to apply material to whole object" it just doesnt work. Nothing happens.
what am I doing wrong or is there a way to really apply a material to the whole object that I am missing?
when tweeking out this texture it takes me forever to do because of all the lil material zones.

Not sure if you have tried this, but you can right click the background inside the material room, and choose select all, and then try to press the apply to all. As im not sure if you dont select all that it works. However its a guess :)

my puter doesnt like me trying to click an object with the eyedropper tool lately. not sure if the puter will handle that (one of the quirks I have had since going vista).
But I will try it :)
anything is better then each time I need to tweek the texture having to go through the whole list each time 0.0

Right click on the texture node, Select All.
Right click again, Apply All

Be forewarned that doing this more than once can sometimes mess up Poser and lose textures applied to the figure in use if it's used too often.  This was a bug in Poser 5 and 6.  I haven't used it in Poser 7 to see if the same bug exists.

Save before doing it to be on the same side.

If it does happen, close and restarat Poser and everything should be fine.