Welcome to our little corner of insanity. ;-)

I'd hold off a little bit on getting Vicki. DAZ is supposedly going to offer up Vicki version 3 before Christmas, so the price of the Vicki 2 CD may go down in price. I really prefer Vicki and Michael over Don and Judy - they're so much more customizable, especially with ethnic and body morphs, and a lot more people have Vic and Mike than have Judy and Don.

A lot of people here use Photoshop to enhance their Poser images. Some people take pride in doing Poser only, but most use at least a bit of postwork. There's some tutorials on the web about how to create realistic clothing and there's also a few commercial books you can purchase and download as well.

Get UVMapper. (There's a free and a commercial version available at uvmapper.com.) Some of the items that you download will not come with a template, so it can be difficult to customize them to your needs. You can use UVMapper to create the template so you can create your own textures.

Search through the forum for questions posted, read the FAQ, and ask away.

Cheers!