I've yet to create a walk in poser that works for me. The characters seem to literally run off the screen in a flash of hyper activity -- sometimes veering completely off the path, they then come back into the scene (apparently on their own power), walking backwards! All this and I can't figure out how to get a figure to simply take one or two steps into the shot and then stop in the middle of the frame. Anyone else have this problem???

sounds like you may have a few keyframes where they are not needed. Try going into your animation keyframes and deleting then all and trying to create the walk again with a clear animation.

Had a similar problem myself. The walk designer seems to work best with figures that haven't been moved from the origin. In particular, I think that if you move the figure by moving its hip, rather than the body, the first step of the walk designer will re-centre the hip, and, as this is a spline keyframe, the first few frames will "rubberband" the figure about the scene. Also, make sure that the walk path starts at the right position and that IK is turned off. Best of lick.

Thanks for the advice -- I'll give it a try. In the meanwhile, does anyone happen to know if you can use the Walk Designer so that the character only takes one or two steps abd then stops???

You can't do that specifically with the walk designer. This is accomplished by using the walk paths so that the path is short. The shorter the path the less steps the character will take.