morphs can be created which only effect a small portion of the bodypart, (I have created jcms which just effect a Dozen verts with MLP),  my guess is that Zbrush is displacing the mesh slightly on you,  or the tools are somehow effecting more of the mesh than you intend, causing the vertex movement you are experiencing on the opposite side. have you tried masking parts of the mesh off in zbrush to see if that helps keep them from being effected?

the thing about figure mixer is that it isn't simply a way of transfering one figure to another as a morph, it blends the two figures completely, repositions the rig as well as blending the two base meshes so that the joints bend in the right position. this just cant be done with a morph transfer.

what you buy should depend on the software you are planning on using with it, and the type of drawing. if you are planning on painting in painter or photoshop for example the extra pen pressure sensitivity and tilt sensitivity of the intuos will really come in handy particularly when using natural painting brushes. For more cartoon type line art drawing you can get away with far less sensitivity and the bamboo will be fine, not saying you can't do painting with the bamboo but I find the difference in sensitivity makes a difference when controlling things like stroke width, and varying opacity.

its really going to depend on what shader information you want, if you want transmapped hair to look decent for example you need to use the software renderer because OGL for transmaps sucks. and things like bump, displacement reflections accurate specularity need the software renderer to even be visible. So I don't think its just the shadows that are an issue.

I suspect that is because it uses the new type of ERC which was added in Poser 7, dependent parameters rather than one of the original forms of ERC. this is a very useful new option but DAZ has yet to implement it.

I haven't used morph manager for years but as I recall you could only add and delete morphs one bodypart at a time, it would be really tedious to do it for a whole figure.

Easypose Underground on the other hand will remove the master and all its slaves all at once.

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i was happy that i was able to tranfer all my PC runtime into Mac with no problems whatsoever, but since now i'm thinking of maybe moving to Daz Studio 3 for mac.. will i be able to move my Runtime there with no issues? because i always see Daz has its own installers, but i wonder if something that has already been installed in Poser will be able to run fine on DS3...

you can link your poser runtime to DAZ studio and everything will work fine, no need to move your runtime, if DAZ has installers for DS though you should install those as well, as those generally contain Studio optimized material presets. (newer installers combine them generally as Studio can now read the studio presets from the poser runtime if there is a poser mat pose of the same name in the same folder).

Strange, the only reason the thumb mesh would disapear on reload is if the thumb bone was named differently than the mesh, if poser doesn't see a bone for the mesh group it wont bother loading the mesh group. check your internal bone names, and as phionix said you need to make sure that both the thumb and the dummy bone are separate children of the hand, not in sequence. if they are disconnected as you said, when you go out of the setup room than that may be because you didn't reselect the hand after creating the dummy bone and before creating the thumb bone.

not sure what you mean by you already welded them, but once you draw the dummy bone you just reselect the hand bone and you will be able to draw the first thumb bone separately from the hand because the hand is anchored at the end to the dummy,

create a dummy bone at the end of the hand bone and than you will be able to draw your new thumb bone.

they should already be in V4.1 they will be in the head in the Visemes catagory under Morphs|Expressions

if you used V4.0 than no you cant add them because the channels weren't there for them.

you can add your current morphs to a new version of V4.1 or .2 simply by saving a pose and selecting include morphs in pose and applying that to the new figure with the morphs you used injected.

What version of V4 do you have? Version 4.0 didn't have them but the base versions of 4.1 and 4.2 do.

This is one of the notorious problems with skirts. (until poser goes to weight mapping-he said wistfully) the issue is that buttocks or thighs, depending on the model you are using and whether they have a buttock group, needs to be really careful of overlapping the hip with the opposite side because if both sides influence the same verteces than they will multiply each other when they are both bent and you will end up with nasty spikes in the mesh. When you have a skirt the problem becomes more pronounced because the fields have to be that much larger. be happy you are using a really short skirt because longer skirts cause even more problems with grouping issues.

Hex has a lot more modeling options than wings, and more than carrara, definitely worth the $10. If I didn't have C4D I would probably be using Hex for its ease of use.