Thanks for the replies everyone.  @Rhia474 - thanks for pointing out the Poser 11 official technical forum, I just posted my question over there and am hoping for a reply soon before the sale ends.

@Richards60, that's also a good idea, I may try that next and see if Poser 12 would run on Win7 too.  I could've sworn that there was a service release where the notes said that after the patch, that Poser 12 would definitely only run on Win10, so it has been something that I just assumed would not run on an older OS.   Poser 11 is the only one that I would want anyway, given that the GameDev features were removed from Poser 12 (for reasons that I still don't understand... decimation is a very much needed feature if I want to fill a scene with a few M4s and V4s).

@Cascade777: thank you, are you running Poser 11 with all of the latest service releases applied?