Sorry, (and thanks very much for ALL the suggestions) but I'm going to have to stop responding now, PLEASE  read the whole thread to see that I do understand what a morph is, and what the requirements for success are, and that I have already stated that the vertices are "kosher". I will update this thread when I have the answer.  Or, I may just say *&^%$% it, and migrate everything to Lightwave, where it's working. Of course, to do that I will need to get MDDPoser  pack up to speed, but that's a topic for a new thread, isn't it?
:) 

re: *Sounds then like you aren't even creating a morph at all.. you are trying to use a completely different mesh as a morph target, which simply will not work at all.

The definition of a morph is a change of point locations in an object. You aren;t changing the location of the verts in the original object atg all.. you are trying to subnstiture a completely different mesh instead.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear,  or clear enough. The app automatically creates both the neutral expression head, and the morph targets, generated from the same mesh and having identical vertice order. I also tried, for shits and giggles, "attempt vertice order correction" in Poser, to no avail.  Plus, the Lightwave object and scene exported in the same way from the same app works perfectly. Plus, I got it to work awhile back in Poser, I just don't know how that happened. 

I think we are all out of ideas as to what's wrong, and so it's natural to want to believe that I have no clue as to what I'm doing, I understand that :)