Please bear with me, I am learning.....

I have been playing with MakeHuman 9.1 RC (free software) and I find it very easy to produce very realistic figures with Makehuman, and they even render beautifully in Makehuman. Except of course, they have no hair or clothes. When I import them into Poser Pro, the geometry is all there, but the texture is all gone and they look really scary. That is OK, I'll need to retexture them, and the mesh is completely new, so no Poser copyright issues. It is also an efficient mesh.

If I import the Collada file created by MakeHuman, there is a skeleton, but it looks very complicated and I don't know if it will even work.. If I import the Obj file there is no skeleton. Has anyone got experience of using MakeHuman Collada files on Poser? Is it better to create my own skeleton in Poser for an Obj file or can the Collada file be used with less effort?

There seems to be so much potential here for creating original figures.
 

I'm on a Mac but texture files are in pixmap / ui. I import objs, do doing my own rigging here.

Quote - That is OK, I'll need to retexture them, and the mesh is completely new, so no Poser copyright issues. It is also an efficient mesh.

Firstly, the Makehuman mesh is copyrighted, although the authors do grant permission for redistribution with the caveat that you state very plainly in whatever docs you provide that it came from Makehuman and include the authors' copyright notice and permission notices:
http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php?post=s1209977542

They have waffled on that a couple of times as I remember.

Secondly, I don't really agree that it's a very efficient mesh, imo it falls into the "okay" category.  For one thing it has a major flaw in that the topology of the armpit is not very anatomically correct.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3287462&ebot_calc_page#message_3287462

I don't have any real opinion about Collada rigging, but it is likely a LOT easier to modify and correct the Collada rig than it would be to do one entirely from scratch. 

Be aware though that your desire for clothes is going to be tough to get started with in Poser when you're working with a custom rig, because no conforming clothing is going to work with it, you're going to have to rig your clothing from scratch.  This is why the common Poser figures tend to be extremely popular as opposed to original figures, because there is a lot of conforming clothing available that is easy to work with.  If you are comfortable with Poser's dynamic cloth then that's not as much of a big deal, but for "hard" clothing items like shoes you'll need to learn to rig them.

Thank you for these most helpful responses. Permission for redistribution is all I need, and thankfully I shall not be needing anatomically correct armpits! I just got Poser. Clearly I have a lot to learn.

Update: Poser Pro's Collada import is not any more useful than importing the Obj file in this case. Quoted from the Poser Pro's reference manual:

COLLADA import in Poser Pro does not currently support Cg shaders, morph targets, bones or animation.

That is a real pity. I hope they improve this sometime.

Search for the makehuman completion kit.

(It used to be at www.soard-web.com/freestuff/MakehumanCompletionKit.zip)

Very easy to get rigged makehuman models into poser with this.

Quote - COLLADA import in Poser Pro does not currently support Cg shaders, morph targets, bones or animation.

... then what good is it? that has me scratching my head.  I thought the whole point of implementing a COLLADA importer was to GET THE BONES!