Quote - try switching to sreed rather than opengl and see if that makes a difference. 

check that the group editor is set to +

woah nice call mark! I switched to sreed and it worked! I can select verts now =)

....which brings us back to the ATI card. with my old geforce card I could keep openGL on all the time (for faster posing ) and never had any issues. apparently the ATI card doesnt work well with poser in openGL mode because it wont let me select vertices AND it wont let me compile a preview animation without massive memory usage and eventually crashing (as posted in another thread).

I dont think Ill be buyng ATI anymore =/

but thank you mark for figuring this out! you da man!