beginner here. I chose "Don for Walk designer" poser model. Exported it into max as 3ds. I created clothes around it.and then imported clothes back into poser. however now the scale doesnt match. isnt there a way to go back and forth between programs and not have to dink with scale and realignment and all that manually? thanks.

First of all, don't use 3DS; use Wavefront OBJ format which is what Poser understands best. Depending on your version of Max, you may need the Habware import/export plugins; later versions can do it unaided. Most modellers scale up before import into Max, and scale down again after export; I don't think Max works very well at tiny scales. It's also best to use the figure mesh direct from the Geometries folder, since that is guaranteed to be completely unposed. If you export, you have to be sure to zero everything, although this is more important for conforming clothes than dynamic ones. The other thing to remember when importing stuff into Poser which is supposed to be the right size (as it will be if you modelled around a Poser mesh and matched your scale up/down correctly), is to uncheck all the boxes on the import dialogue. When it says "100% of standard figure size" it will actually rescale your import to be the height of a standard figure.

Objaction Scaler (from freestuff here) is a wonderful tool. Import the base geometry into Max, scale up by a factor of 96 (if you're using inches), or 250 (if you're using centimeters), model your cloth, and export as .OBJ, scale by a factor of 1. Then run Objaction Scaler to scale it down by the same factor you used when importing the base geometry. Import the cloth object into Poser with all checkboxes (except perhaps Weld Identical vertices) turned off.

I'd reccomend using at least max7, too. It's obj imp/exp is a lot better. Really, it's made all the difference, for me.

I finally upgraded to Max 8 recently, I just wanted to mention: 1, The OBJ import/export plugin looks rather like the Habaware one, and 2, it has the same scaling bug on export that Habaware does. I'm sure it IS the Habaware one. Import scaling is O.K. though (I use 1000 X), just be careful on "complicated" ot multi-group OBJ exports, if the bug strikes they get moved in space. I use Maz's Scaler on my 1:1 exported files, as svdl said. You can (mostly) scale morphs O.K. though.