HI icandy, first of all, thankyou for your perserverence, there's no deadline for this, so please take as long as it takes. Seems like many Poserites, once a problem gets it's teeth into you...

I thought I'd give hedheld's suggestion a try too, I made a quick and dirty texture for PhilC's dress,  using the template to darken alternate columns of quads and did some renders without simulating the cloth.

image 1 shows the wireframe

image 2 plain white/untextured

image 3 striped texture applied to diffuse and specular material

image 4 as above but with bump and displacement.

I think if I took more time over the texture, and "burned" one edge of the stripes for fake shadow the effect would better