I'm selecting parts of the body to include in a pose. I only want certain main parts like the hand and all its fingers and the thigh and dependent parts. Do I have to click on each little box and each sub-box in the hierarchy, or is there some shortcut key-stroke/mouse-stroke combination to select members of a group (like all the fingers of a hand)?

You could make a script that would write out specific body parts, or you can chop them out with an editor after it's saved.  There isn't any built in way to repeatedly save only specific parts of a pose, it's either everything for the figure (which includes magnets in V4, which is very bad, and a lot of other junk besides) or you have to carefully go through the hierarchy each and every pose.  You might want to look at "PoseWriter Premium" included in some versions of Poser, if you have it.

I got it included with Poser 8 (Scripts -> Netherworks)

Thanks for that... I was afraid you were going to say that. Oh well, Python to the rescue once again. I'll have a look at PoseWriter... thanks again.

Alt+click selects/deselects the actor and all of its children.

saving to the hand library saves only the hand and finger detail.

Alt+!!!! and I tried Ctrl+ and Shift+. THANK you! PhilC. That was precisely what I was after.

I was saving to the pose library - bottom and top of body poses - following a discussion in another thread that we need less heroic/super-model type poses and more common-human-activity ones. I'm particularly keen for feminine poses (I love Ilona's hand sets - just need the body complement to them) since most of what seems to be out there is very extreme models putting themselves in highly suggestive, completely impractical (and to me, a bit over-the-top tarty) positions. There's heaps of those, with more coming out all the time.

Oh, oops, I misread your initial question - I thought you were looking for a way to repeatably save bodyparts A/B/C and exclude bodyparts D/E/F.  Yeah alt+click can save you many clicks otherwise.

Actually, Mark, you make an interesting point. That will be useful for other poses I intend to do in the future... and pjz99: I didn't state my question very clearly. Thanks for bringing up an alternative approach to saving poses... I can see how it could prove useful!

Here you go, a picture tutorial

Saving Partial Poses

Thank you, Acadia... you've made a very clear, well-written tutorial. Well done! I picked up quite a few pointers from it. I do like your style... makes the process very clear.
If it hasn't been stickied, it certainly should be (probably has been, and I did a search instead of looking in the stickied threads first, which should be standard operating procedure)...

A bit of an enlargement on what Acadia described in her tutorial and what PhilC clarified further up in this thread:
I do as Acadia recommends and click on Universe which deselects everything. Then I manually select (not using the Alt key) Hip through Head:

This prevents any of those subordinate morphs thingies from being selected. Then I click on:

Right Collar (no Alt key), then:

Alt + left-mouse Click on Right Shoulder, which also selects everything beneath it. However, it prevents selecting these:

magnetty thingies which I don't want selecting.

Saving myself a bit of carpal-tunnel damage... thanks to both of you, Acadia and PhilC.

Oh, one other point. In my version of Poser (7 sr3) this dialogue shows up:

I do leave them both unticked, is that right?

Thanks again for all your help, everyone!

Leave the 2  boxes in that last window unchecked. 

You don't want to include morph channels because you just want to save the poses, so that you can use the poses without changing the existing morphs in your figure when you apply the pose.

Excellent. Thanks so much, Acadia... you're a gem!

Hmmmmm been doing some stuff with hands. Thought I might share my findings with you and see what you think.

I've got a fully-loaded (all Morphs++) V4 that I'm using to create my poses. Now, I realise I don't need all the morphs... indeed, they may get in the way, but never-the-less this is the girl I'm "using"... in the nicest possible way, of course.

I decided to try saving a hand pose, which I did by the click on the [ + ] in the hand library, which asks which hand's pose I intend to save. I selected "left" which was the pose I had modified. It then asked for the Save Frames (single frame) and that was it. The thumbnail was a screenshot of my LHand Camera view of the hand.
So far, so cool.

I opened this in Poser File Editor to see how what I had created compared to what I consider the industry standard: Ilons'a Pretty Hands.
Right.

Under  version, it had 7 point something, which I changed to 4.01, which is what Ilona has. I would guess that it makes things more compatible to use an earlier version number.

Then, under each actor, it said rHand, rThumb1 etc, even though I had selected "left". Same as in Ilona's file, so I guess that's what it saves as.

Under channels, Ilona only had rotateX xrot, rotateY yrot and rotateZ zrot. Poser 7 sr3 generated all these other channels: a whole slew of target Geoms fbms and pbms. Well, Ilona didn't have that stuff and so neither shall I so I deleted the lot.

Now, I have tried a hand pose from someone who had left them in. I'm not certain if it's cause-and -ffect but invoking that pose generated a "Information stored in this library entry does not pertain to figures of this type" error. After I took those target Geoms fbms and pbms out in Poser File Editor it posed correctly without the error. Don't think the error in-and-of-itself is a fatal one, but it's annoying and to novice users a bit disconcerting.

I really recommend against working with a morphed figure to save poses from, if you ever plan to distribute those poses.  For one thing, some "morphs" are actually scaling bones (e.g. hands size, shoulders size in V4) and will make poses that do not work the same way vs. the normal character.  Bends will be to the same degree, but since the bones are of different lengths, results will be different.  If you're only ever going to use those poses with that particular morphed character, that's OK.

Quote - Then, under each actor, it said rHand, rThumb1 etc, even though I had selected "left".

This is the difference between Internal Names for things, which is all Poser cares about, but never shows you; and the friendly name, which it never actually uses for anything but to show you in place of the real Internal Name.

Poser 7 and onwards also includes some junk for "Universal Poses" including thighLength, targetFigure and refFigure.  If you're redistributing, best take these out.  Also for every actor, you probably see channel information for "translateX" "translateY" "translateZ".  It is safest to delete these also, even if you think they're all zero - what if a user doesn't WANT them to be zero?  At best, you want them to do nothing, and if you delete them from the pose file then they'll do nothing.

Quote - I really recommend against working with a morphed figure to save poses from, if you ever plan to distribute those poses.  For one thing, some "morphs" are actually scaling bones (e.g. hands size, shoulders size in V4) and will make poses that do not work the same way vs. the normal character.  Bends will be to the same degree, but since the bones are of different lengths, results will be different.  If you're only ever going to use those poses with that particular morphed character, that's OK.

This is an important point you make. So if I wish to distribute my partial poses (I've already cleaned my hand poses), use a "virgin" V4 to make and save them in, and then still have a look at the pz2 in PFE to make sure P7 didn't save any unneeded rubbish.
Thanks, pjz99.

 if you want to save a stripped down pose file and select only certain body parts in P7 or before, look at http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php?page=2&userid=44709  Save Pose by Ajax. Works like a champ and use it all the time. Has a ton of options. For some reason which I have yet to explore it does not work in P8 or Pro2010. Something to do with the tinker update I assume in p8 and pro2010