I just wanted to check on something before I merrily go about rigging something and find out at the end that I screwed it up from the get go.

Is there anything wrong with conforming the character figure to the clothing figure?

I find it a real pain, when I am trying to fine tune weightmaps to avoid pokethrough, going back to the base figure and adjustin the rotations of the joints, then re-selecting the clothing figure to adjust the weightmap.  I also keep on forgetting to switch back and end up changing the weightmap of the character figure instead of the clothing figure.

I can't see any reason why you should not conform a character to clothing. I have done that on the odd occasion, and have not experienced problems. Before you conform the character, turn off IK for both character and clothing, zero the character, then Memorize it in the zeroed state.

I just had  a thought. There may be problems if the character uses JCMs. Rotating a limb in the clothing would not automatically activate any JCM in the character. I think you would need to set up the same JCM channels and slaving in the clothing. Then in Poser, with the Body of the character selected, set 'Include morphs when conforming' in the Body's Properties. The JCM channels in the clothing would not necessarily contain any deltas. For the purpose of activating the JCM in the character, it would be sufficient that the channels existed, and had the same slaving.

well mostly I am using antonia WM right now and she doesnt have any JCMs that I know of.  I'm not sure about Alyson2 who is the other character I keep 'trying' to make stuff for

Antonia WM does have a bit of JCM, but I don't think any of it would affect what you are doing. I found the following channels in Antonia WM:

JCM-TongueOut
JCM-MouthOpen
JCM-lToeBendUp
JCM-rToeBendUp
JCM-lThumbGraspNeg
JCM-lThumbGrasp
JCM-lThumbSpread
JCM-rThumbGraspNeg
JCM-rThumbGrasp
JCM-rThumbSpread

oh yes that would make sense.. I think all those areas have the conventional rigging

There are no channel names containing "JCM" in Alyson2, so that probably means that she does not have any JCM. She does have magnets, I'm not sure how that works with what you are doing.

well I'll give it a try as it doesnt look like it will make the whole project go completly wrong at any rate.

I think BH did add a few JCMs to his anastasia morph, so hopefully they wont interfere too much