I wonder what the reasoning behind moving these things to separate geometry and texture folders was?

    I think it has to do with re-usability. Referenced items like texures and geometries typically are restricted from distribution so for supporting content you have to rely on what is installed. if you want to bring your Vicky derivative you should know where the geometry file is located or add an install procedure.

Edit again: To be fair to Poser, 99 times out of 100, I'll bet the non-responding lengthy search comes from a path error in the file. Just that in this case, paths were all correct. Odd. :)

Was that an absolute reference or a relative reference? Were cases of pahnames OK? There is an ambiguity with lowercase and uppercase. DOS and windows systems traditionally were non-case sensitive in path names. Apple and Unix systems AFAIK have always used path names that were case sensitive. Poser working on both Mac and PC has been adhering to the more strict Mac convention. When Windows abandoned the 8 chars max filename length and started to allow spaces etc. in path names life got even more complicated and sometimes confusing. Agree that Poser does surprisingly well in most cases but can sometimes cause other surprises.