Poser does very nice thumbnails if you know how to. Just render with 91*91 pixels and save the image as png into the library (overwrite the one that was created automatically).

Bones always belong to a geometry (which is nothing more than 1 ore more polygons and a name). So, if you have a bone named lWing1 there must also be a geometry named lWing1. I think this is even case-sensitive.
You create bones in the Setup room. There you can also set up (and name) polygon groups, but I find it much easier to do this in an external modeller like Wings3D.
As far as I remember you cannot change the name of a polygon group with the grouping tool, but you can easily change the name of the bone. (Actually, a bone has two names, an internal and an external. I always use the same name for both. This saves me some thinking.)
Hope this helps a little.

But my favourite is still missing: glowing material like in Vue :-(

I had an error like this one just today with Poser. What I finally did was to open the jpg-file in Photoshop and save it under a different name. The new file then worked perfectly.

I purchased Vue 5 at the Daz sale and i received my copy of the software yesterday. I see that i have been sent a German (Deutsche) version of the software. Exactly the same thing happened to me. Since I am a German this is not a big problem, it just surprised me a little. Anyway, when I installed it I was asked which language I wanted. English was available, too. What doesn't switch is of course the manual which is in German ...

but what exactly would the difference be if I loaded up the pro pack versions of an item as opposed to the regular poser 4 version With DAZ-stuff the difference lies in the textures. As far as I remeber, the old version tries to put bump maps in the old .bum-file format which is'nt supported in P5 and P6 any more. They use jpg or tif for bumpmaps which makes them much easier to open in programs like Photoshop. The Propack version uses this new file format. By the way: DAZ never takes advantage of all the new material room features of P5 and P6 so there is plenty of room for your own improvements.

I have tried out several programs including Truespace and Shade. But now, my personal one and only is Wings3D. But this very much depends on your own preferences. As for Wings3D: it seems not to have many features but it is very easy to learn and much more powerful than it seems in the beginning. (I have two items in the marketplace and they both were made entirely with Wings3D. Just search for "Kyraia's villa" and "Thobex", if you want to see what this program is capable of).

Is there a way to fix the geometry of the wave hair within Wings3D? Recently, I had the same problem. I knew the solution but I wanted to try and analyse the cause, but in Wings3D there didn't show up any obvious geometry errors. Anyway, I didn't spend much time with it but maybe someone has tried and solved this matter already. (Maybe the grandmaster himself?)

1. After I parent M3 will he automatically follow the horse like a conformed object would?

Parenting means that the child figure (or object / camera / light) follows rotations and moves of the parent.
Conforming means this plus the conformed figure bends together with its parent. This is essential with clothes but it doesn't make any sense (and is probably impossible) with a rider and a horse.
If the saddle is parented to the horse then you can parent the rider to the saddle. Or you can parent him to the horse, just as you like. Try it out, you can always change it back.
And if you are sure that you never move the horse around then you don't need any parenting at all.

I wrote a little tutorial about this. It is in German but you can still see from the images how the shader nodes have to be set up. http://www.jasms.de/diverses/poser/reflect/reflect.html There are several possibilities, but the important thing it to turn on "raytracing".

No, you don't have to use the joint editor or hand-edit the CR2. If you wish, you can set new dial values from Poser's parameter panel and then memorize (via the Edit menu) to retain these changes Thank you, this is very interesting. >One more thing about initValue ... when you conform something (clothing, hair, etc.), it reverts to its memorized values I know. This has been bugging me for some time. So, with memorize I can easily fix that. A very helpful hint. Thanks again :-)

Making socks or stockings by yourself is a good exercise :-) Load the character you want to get dressed. Export the parts that shall become clothes (thighs, shins, feet, toes in this case) as obj. Now you can import this into a modeller like Wings3D, scale and modify it etc. Import it into Poser again, go into the setup room and load the skeleton of the original character into it. Then, delet all body parts that are no longer needed, like fingers, eyes, head etc. Now, you have a figure (the stockings) that can be conformed. To be honest ... I have done this several times, but when I conform such clothes to a character the bending of the joints changes in a strange way. I don't know yet why, but of course this can be fixed manually by bending and scaling. So, this simple method is not perfect, but a nice try.