Well, I decided to take the plunge and upgraded from 2.41 to 2.42. I'm still very new to Blender and I'm doing a lot of experimenting and very little actual project making. I did have an idea, but it involves using figures from Poser or DAZ Studio imported in to Blender. I'm figuring out how to apply textures ok, but I'm lost on making the transparency maps apply properly. To top it off, the interface got changed around with a bunch of new settings to play with.

I would really appreciate someone with experience in handling Poser or DAZ Studio imports to shed some light on this.

Update: I found an old tutorial that showed me how to apply transparencies but I still have a problem. After applying the trans maps, the shadow cast by the object doesn't change to show where the trans map is.

As an example, I tried a very simple render of a square plane with a circle on the trans map. The render shows my circle casting a shadow of the square plane.

Click the trashad button on the object that recieves the shadow. It is located in the Material's shaders tab.

Thank you! That did it.