You are a saint, my friend.

Maybe your normals are reversed? At the very bottom of the PoserSurface list check Normals_Forward on and see what happens. Sure looks like reversed normals to me, anyway.

I guess you could always just set your working window to 200x240 for the time being and render your movie from the current settings. Then later on change your working window back to 400x480.

As an option, Poser allows you to save individual frames of an animation. It will do it automatically as one of it's "Make Movie" options. Then you can take these individual frames and combine them in some other video application. This is the best way to do it because if there is a crash, you can pick up where you left off.

Sure, I've done it lots of times. Just make sure you save your original file somewhere in case you screw up the one you are working on. Do a search in your text editor using .bmp as your search criteria and replace every .bmp with .jpg - just make sure the .jpg file actually exists in your textures folder first.

You could play around with magnets. It would be a lot of work and take a lot of time, but with a little practice you could get the face just the way you want it. Or just buy some pre-made morphs from the marketplace.

Kind of big looking for a beastie. :o) When I think of a beastie,
I think of some little forest creature, like a bunny or a mouse.
Course it's hard to tell from a picture, maybe he's only
6 inched tall?

Depends. Poser 6 does more, such as IBL (image based lighting) which uses raytracing, so that slows down render time. The real test is to do an apples to apples comparison. Same scene, same lights, same shadow set-up, same render parameters, and then see whihc one is faster. As far as dynamic hair and clothes, there are a new set of characters, James, Jessica, Ben and Kate that have their own hair and clothes. Plus you get LaRoo and she has some clothes and hair. Plus you get Alpha Man and Beta Boy, and they have some clothes. And included in Poser 6 is Kozaburo's prop hair. And of course all the Poser 4 and 5 cloths and hair. But the real charm of Poser 6 is the hair and cloth room They are a magnitude faster and more stable than Poser 5. In the cloth room you can actually watch the cloths take shape, it calculates that fast.

Even better if you have Poser 5 or 6 is to create multiple runtimes. I have separate runtimes for clothes, props, animals, Star Wars stuff, etc. There are several tutorials that show you how to do this. That way I keep my main runtime relatively clean so if I have to do a re-install there is less chance of losing something.

Like anything else, practice hones your ability. I was pretty pathetic with magnets too at first, but now I can do just about anything I want with them, except maybe have them cook my breakfast. I think you would be better off and learn more if you try it yourself rather than just using someone else's canned solution.

It would help if you would put a more specific description of your problem in your header instead of just "HEEEEELP"

You could also play around with the x and z dials to make the chest wider and deeper. You might also have to tweak the abdomen and neck dials to eliminate any step effect.

Also anything black in the map will show tranparent in the render, anything white will be opaque, and anything gray will be semitransparent. Transmaps are also great for masking off clothing items. Such as if you want to make a pair of shorts out of long pants, just make a transmap with the legs black and the hip white.

What are screens? And how do you not use them?

When you went to save your light array did you click on select subset and check on each light you wanted to save? Still won't save your prop or any parenting but it will save all your lights. But if you have the square present already, then when you later bring in your lights they should smart parent to the square.