Hmm, is there some secret Poser rule that says the parent bone for each figure must be called 'hip'? Because I had very strange things happen when I tried your second hip trick. Could you maybe post a screen shot of the hierarchy editor to show how things are related to each other in your setup, and how they are named?

Another thing I tried today is make the abdomen the base instead of the hip. The hip (or pelvis) and chest would then move relatively to it. It looked pretty useful at first glance, but since Poser started to act weird when I tried to re-load the cr2 with that setup, I haven't played around with it much yet.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.