geep - the tech said to use the circle to move the bodies, and voila!  That hadn't occurred to me as I always render with single figures, had NEVER used the circle for movement and consistently moved any figure quickly and easily with the 'back/forward' or 'up/down' icons.  That process does NOT work AT ALL when you have more than one figure.  I still cannot believe the hoops I put my computer through to fix this and it all came down to a "duh" moment.   Funny thing is that I searched poser forums, poser tuts, knowledge bases and even fed search engine strings searching for the solution and nothing came up at all.  Maybe it's considered to be such basic common sense that it didn't require a mention.     :)