Ah, I see. Looking more closely at your images.

Well, I've seen a lot of weird behavior in the preview, and generally haven't paid much attention to it because it's the final render that I'm concerned with. Sometimes there's something that causes concern. But usually the reverse of what you have. The object shows fine in preview but renders incorrectly -- which I believe is a texture caching issue.

Have you tried the "reload textures" option? 

Edit: The big fonts are from typing your text within the same text box as the quote, so your text is getting the same formatting. (I do it constantly, and it's annoying indeed.) Before, it was visibly separated by [/quote] tags, so no one made that mistake.

Oh, so if I type down here it is indeed smaller... Reload textures is the first thing that came to mind, since I had seen things come in looking black when textures couldn't be loaded for whatever reason.  No, this is just how Poser works for me...  I need to make the props because there's no easy way to change the objects' default location and scale.  Scaling and positioning the object then making a new prop from it gives me a new "zeroed" object.  This new object should of course look the same, but in my case never does...  Not in preview anyway.  It's not a mesh error, because simply copy/pasting the material to the prop makes it look as it should.

Possible reasons for my problem:  Specific to meshes imported from Wings (why?)...  Because there are no "figures" in my scene (actually read something somewhere that made me think of this)?  Some value or option in the mat room isn't being copied to the new prop (have compared them a number of times without seeing what it could be).