I did do one thing that might have broken it
tried reimporting exported pinned physics cloth
kept crashing it or importing not as pinned physics cloth

a solution of sorts or rather a workaround
found my beta test backup exe

still no answer other than using my backup BIN folder to reimport them

Daz genesis decimated in Ultimate unwrap as well as decimator
find the latter does a better job on the exported from iClone 3dx5pipeline animated FBX files than decimating original figure in Daz,
these can be saved as animated props in the earlier version and merged as animated crowds,

I found today it has mysteriously fixed itself