Quote - Please will somebody unlock the closely gaurded secrets of performing certain animation tasks in Poser, 9 or Pro 2012?

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It is actually rather simple, but it took me a while to figure it out, too; Poser's capability to posing figures is mainly based on two stages:

1 - first all the parameters (the dials on the right hand side of the screen) are evaluated. to shape the figure. Those dials have values and only those values can be used to make keyframes of.

2 - Second, there is a second phase on posing your figure, these are the so-called constraints. These include IK and PointAt, and i believe also the parenting-constraint from Poser2012/9. These modify the pose of your figure, but they do not have any effect on the values in the parameters panel. That means it makes a difference if a knee is bent because of the FK-bend value changed, or because of the IK bends it. When the IK bends the knee, the value in the parameters actually does not change, the bending takes place more "behind the scenes". You cannot animate those hidden parameters, because there are no values to make keyframes of. And more than that, if you happen to have any dependent parameters derived from the numeric input parameters, those dependencies will not get evaluated when using IK or PointAt, because their input value does not change.

So in short, i think of IK and PointAt as more of a posing help than actual being useful for animation (or even for normal posing, because of the dependent-parameters thing). In general you should disable all of them for keyframes, except in some cases, like animating a robot figure with no dependent parameters or just a bunch of independent props.