Quote - If you mean did I memorize the shirt before I saved it, no I didn't know I had to do that.

Well strictly speaking, you only need to do it if  the current Memorized state is not the zeroed state. However the memorized state of the conformer not being zero, is one of the most common causes of conformers not working properly. So if your conformer is not working properly it's probably a good idea to zero, Memorize, and resave, just to be sure you have that base covered.

Quote - as for theorigins and endpoints, I made sure when I added the bones that they were at zero

That can't be! A figure could not possibly work correctly if all the origins and endpoints were set to zero.

Quote - I didn't use the target figure in the setup room I did the bones from scratch. I think rigging is over my head!

I'm not an expert on rigging conformers, but it's my understanding, that to work correctly, the origins and endpoints of the conformer need to be an exact clone (to at least four places after the decimal point) of those in the target figure. I think that the usual way of ensuring that, is to use a morph striped version of the target figure as the rig for the conforming clothing, or to use the dev rig that is sometimes provided with a figure.

I would suggest you try this. Load the target figure in Poser. Zero it, Memorize it, and save it back to the Figure palette with a new name. Open the resulting cr2 in a text editor, and edit the path in the two 'figureResFile' to point to the obj for your shirt.

If that rig works, you can think about cleaning up the cr2 to remove unnecessary and or copyrighted stuff.