Some hair props apply themselves to the selected  figure when you load them into the scene,  others appear as a separate item in the scene & have to be 'parented' to the head.

You're going to have to start small, and build things up slowly as you learn what's needed. You need to find the 'timeline' tab, at least that's what it's called in DS 1.5. Load a character into the scene with as little extra stuff added as possible. So no background, clothes, props, et c. Find some animation pose files, try the ones from www.combat-bunny.com, I had a look today and the ones I used are still there. Apply one to your figure, and the timeline fills up with stuff. You can run the animation from the timeline, it runs in realtime so may 'skip' a few frames to get by, but it should give you an idea of how it will look. It won't necessarily look right on your chosen figure, arms passing through each other et c, so you will have to step through the frames using the timeline controls, and edit the pose at maybe half second intervals. Each time you alter a frame, you have to set it as a 'key frame' using the appropriate button on the timeline. When you're happy-ish with the result, SAVE!!!, then render. For a first attempt, I would set render quality to 'open GL', it's MUCH faster than a software render. Open the render settings, choose to render to file, as an animation not a still image, and as an AVI. Set the image size to something small, say 150 X 150 pixels. When the render finally completes, you get a 'save as' dialog box, I would save as AVI without compression, it saves having compatability problems with your media player. You could also choose to save as a series of still images, set the frame rate to, say, four frames per second, then convert the frames to a GIF animation. And that's about it, I'm still learning how to animate with DAZ, so can't help much more than that. I'm also using DS 1.5, so you'll probably have more advanced features than I have access to on my windows 98 PC!

If it's possible in the real world, you can make it happen in DAZ, you will need to use the timeline tab to set up key frames & stuff. I'm still struggling with animations myself, it's very tedious & time-consuming. Plenty of tutorials about, best to read as many as possible. You definitely need to master the basics of posing a character and making still-image renders first.
DAZ also gives many options for saving the animation, AVI etc. I mostly make very short clips, say 1 to 5 seconds, then save as BMP frames. Then I can convert to GIF, and use EGIFAN or AGIFED to make an animated GIF file.

I had a look in the runtime on my graphics workstation last night, you might find these useful:

Amy for A3, V3, V4, from Amy_Aimei on sharecg.com, has breast & nipple morphs, and takes gen3/gen4 'skin' as appropriate. Try the MAT files for VIETCONG KIM for V3 & VIETCONG LINH for V3 from www.vanishingpoint.biz

!Aiko3 to SP.cr2 from DAZ, needs Aiko3 full, also available from DAZ (both free), turns Aiko into Stephanie (with nipples), takes gen3 'skin' & Stephanie's clothes.

There are also some simple genital morphs out there, I found one for Stephanie that works for A3 & V3, but if you want some fuzz you'll have to find a character download that has it included in the MAT pose, some do some don't.

Hope this helps!

You buy stuff???
Try Maya doll, from
http://www.3digitalcrafts.net/studiomaya/1download/mdb/index.html
Not quite as good as Victoria for photo-realism, but she does have some interesting attributes... There's also a V3UV available, which allows you to use V3 'skin' with her.
There is plenty of free stuff out there for her, and most of the stuff for Anime doll also fits her.
Search here on Renderosity, or google for AD/MD.
Also worth looking for MDP-F202, she also has a V3UV, not at all realistic, but has some nice breast morphs.
Not to forget Sara.
Note also that 'hair' props for most figures can be moved about & re-sized to make them fit any figure. Most of the stuff I get ( for free!!!) is made for Poser, but usually works O.K. in DAZ.

Thanks, but I only have free stuff, so no morph packs. I have a few freebie morphs, though, so I should probably take a closer look at them.

Try www.sharecg.com , and look for Amy for Aiko3. It's a free custom morph & skin set. Clothing downloads for the regular Aiko3 won't fit her very well, but there are some Amy-fit clothing downloads from the same site by the same artist.

DAZ|studio comes in many versions, stuff made for later versions won't work in earlier versions.
I found version 1.7 onwards crashes on my machine, but 1.4 to 1.5 were fairly stable, so I keep
to 1.5. This means most stuff now made for DAZ|studio is no use to me, but I can usually find
a way to make Poser content run crash-free. So, keep to the many Poser freebies available,
try them out, if they ain't no good you don't lose anything!
My Poser runtime is huge, I have very little D|S content at all.

There used to be a quick-start guide last year, if you can find that, it's quite useful.

A few assorted bits & pieces you may find useful, all freestuff:

Scenes:
Poolkit- http://www.zokeimaster.com/
Washitsu- http://mugi.site.ne.jp/lab108

Clothing:
School swimwear for MayaDoll- www.3digitalcrafts.net/studiomaya/
Malefic-SuitV3.zip
TabXmas06-AmaraA3(C)Tabala 2006
Extreme swimsuits for A3 from- http://www.zokeimaster.com/
RacingSwim for A3 from- http://www.zokeimaster.com/
MD schoolgirl.zip- by Taruru.
A3schoolUF.zip- by tentman.
A3schooluniform.zip- (textures) by sarponita.
Harness for V3,A3,MD- can't remember who made it!
A3SchoolShoes.zip- by tentman.
l33t school girl-a3.zip- by EvilInnocence, plus many texture downloads.
(also for V3)
KatarinaPOB_V3_31785.zip- by powerage.

Props:
Washitsu lamp- http://mugi.site.ne.jp/lab108
Tatami- http://mugi.site.ne.jp/lab108
dog_collar- http://mugi.site.ne.jp/lab108
Ptrope_V3_Ball_Gag- http://www.ptrope.com
Gymladder- http://www.joes3dfantasyworlds.com/down/downpreview.htm
rdna_epflail.zip- http://www.runtimedna.com
rdna_chainednip.zip- http://www.runtimedna.com
Legs spacer V3.zip- can't remember who made it!
ADP_BodyExposer.zip
bondage rack.zip- by bugrer1.
Cage.zip- www.most-digital-creations.com
Quist3D_Frame01.zip- http://www.sharecg.com/v/13406/poser/Quist3D-Frame-1
Quist3D_Frame04.zip-

Various props from: http://trekkiegrrrl.dk
                    http://www.renderotica.com
                    www.sharecg.com

There's lots more free stuff on my hard drive, but some people don't leave a readme file
or include a name or contact details so I can't figure out where I got them from. But a
good search on Renderosity & sharecg.com should turn up lots more, and it's well worth
doing a Google search for Poser stuff and set the advanced search to include only
Japanese websites. There's lots of good quality Japanese free stuff out there.

You don't need any particular settings for lights, you don't even need lights at all as DAZ uses a default 'in camera' flash if you don't set up any lights. You do, however, have to use 3Delight renderer not OpenGL. Shadows are a seperate issue to reflections. I'm fairly new to DAZ|Studio and CG in general, so I had many settings to learn myself, so I made up a 'cheat sheet', I have attatched it to this reply. I hope you can make some use of it, I assume you have found the surfaces tab. Making a mirror is very simple, doesn't really affect render times and adds depth to a picture. I don't recommend making figure / body shapes into a mirror, I did this recently and a picture that took less than ten minutes to render went up to FOUR HOURS after I changed one figure into a mirror setting. Use reflection maps instead, you'll hardly notice the difference.

No stills, no animation. Just a media player 11 download, then no video.

Try Speech Synthesizer 5.0 (speech50.exe), there is a trial version available, you get a small selection of voices and can vary the playback speed/pitch et c. It's not brilliant, but it's still entertaining! You'll have to google for it, as it's available from many download sites.

I upgraded to D|S 1.7, found it wasn't compatible with WIN98SE, so I had to downgrade all the way back to 1.4.16 without all the current updates. In the meantime I did find the installation was quite easy, no problems, and it is possible to make the interface look identical to the 'classic' version then save the setup ( I sometimes get 'mouse happy' and screw up the settings!). And you can delete all the other interfaces from their folder, if you look for it.