Quote - hi, I'm running PoserPro 2014, and the layers behave as they should.

In the Layers tab, you've got Current Layers Only, Include In Playback and a Composite Method to choose (all at the left side of the panel), having some of those (un)checked might affect what you're seeing in the preview.

Thanks for your helpful response. I'm using Pro 2014 too (I should have mentioned that in my initial post), so I'll go take a look and see if I can sort it out.

After my post I started practicing some animations without the layer function or editing tools, just using the dope sheet and the graph, and it worked really, really nicely, so I'm now feeling quite confident again