My bad!  The hip object is where the problem is.  Not sure whether this will help anyone else but I found out what happened in my case and that V4 in that particular scene of mine is now FUBAR.
    As an explanation:  I was working on the scene in P8.  Since P8 takes a long time to come up I left it up and running while I went to take a nap.  When I got up and only after I'd resaved the scene did I notice the problem (I'd had V4, everything touching her and all lights affecting her all set).
    I tried loading the scene into P7 but had the same problem.  A bit later I noticed that the lights on my sound system were flashing.  That's an indication that there was a power fluctuation.  Not one bad enough to reboot my computer but possibly bad enough to mess up files that were in memory.
I expect the following to be true although I can't prove it:

1. If I hadn't saved the file before discovering the problem I would only have had to close Poser, reopen it and reload the scene to correct the problem.
2. all other similar problems are probably caused in a similar fashion.

If, as I have, you saved the corrupted file over your last good save the only answers are to rebuild the scene or at least reload everything associated with V4 or find a way to edit and correct the pz3 file.
Anyone know of an editor that can edit and save a pz3 file?  I really don't want to have to redo all the posing for V4.