Silke, without seeing the dress I need to make some assumptions from your story.

1 this was a strapless/armless dress?

2 what do you exactly mean by "adjust for rotation"? If you have the dress fitted to the figure in the first frame, and the figure rotates in some way to assume the final pose do you mean you are also manually adjusting the dress to that rotation? Rather than letting the dress drape dynamically on it;s own s the sim progress'?

When you say you used "harsher setting" I assume you mean you increased the stretch resistance and the stretch dampening, di you also increase the static friction and dynamic friction settings? It;s been a while since I used dynmics clothing but these settings may be the key to your problem.

3 If you are using Poser 8 there is a new check box on the cloth room controls called "Collision Friction", you might want to check that on and see if it helps as well.

In ALL cases me totally sure that the dress does not poke into any vertices on your base figure (or vice verse) as this can cause a great deal of trouble in your sim.

If you can give any more specifics on your experiment, such as settings used and if possible a screen cap before running the sim and after running the sim I can try to duplicate it and give you some better answers. (Don;t worry about who made the dress, if I can see a pick I can probably model SOMETHING that is reasonably close to experiment with).