OK, have just got back to th computer; busy morning.

It's connected to the version of Poser 7. As reported yesterday I installed Poser 7 on an external drive and the render worked perfectly. Just now I upgraded the Poser 7 (using the SR3) from 70071 to 704220 and - the figure promptly rendered black again.

So that pins the problem to the version of P7.

@richardson: will try screenshot now.

@MissNancy: external drive is running Leopard, not Tiger, so I think we can rule out the version of the OS.