All: Thanks all, for helping me out. Based on what I've learned here, I became convinced that I had something wrong with Poser. So I went to Curious Labs and found that there is indeed a patch for Poser 3. I installed it and now everything works! There are actually materials present besides the infernal Preview, and when I render, I get the colors I expect. I'm not one to patch very often, for fear of breaking something, but this patch was obviously needed. Any Poser 3 user who has this problem should defiantly go get the patch. My sincere thanks to ronstuff, Steve Cox, jschoen, Cybermonk and yggdrasil for your assistance. Now I can get back to the work of trying to get decent at this stuff. jon

 
~jon
My Blog - Mad Utopia Writing in a new era.