Often I  fail to apply textures to props and clothes. 

I've just made a Celtic sword, it shows up nicely in (P7). I close down, open the .obj in UVMapper, map it planar and resave, save the texture map as .bmp. Change it to .jpeg, and go back into Poser and reload. In Material, make a new node, 2D texture, image map. I select the texture bitmap, it shows in the Material windows, but nothing on the sword in preview or render.

I did this with a pair of athletic shorts I modifed, and after 4 or 5 failures it suddenly applied the texture.

What am I doing wrong?

Colin_S