You need to be careful when doing a search-and-replace in a text editor. Changing 'hip' to 'waist' everywhere will probably also change 'hip2' to 'waist2'. So you'd have to change all occurrences of 'waist2', not 'hip2', to 'hip' in the second step.

ETA: Ha! SteveJax beat me to it.

I can write a quick-and-dirty Python script that will walk through a whole folder tree and do a text-base replacement automatically for each file that looks like a Poser or geometry file, if anyone's interested.

(PMDs excluded, sorry folks!)

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.