I learn something new every day. Today I have learned about 2 more quirks with soft cloth.  Maybe someone already knows that but...

1. Did you know that even if you have disabled a soft cloth bake, and you do "Remove object animation" from a character, the very first frame of the soft cloth is still getting baked? This finally answers my question as to why skirt/dress is left behind sometimes when you transform a character at the beginning of the clip (while soft bake is off).

2. This one is even more weird. If you need to start an animation off with a pose far different from the default (lets say a sitting pose), and then later your character stands up, the soft cloth (a skirt in my case) is getting deformed for the rest of the clip without a chance to recover. I guess it matters how the physics gets initialized. But then you always need to start with a standing pose and cut final clip at the beginning if necessary (unless someone knows how to overcome this).
BTW, simulating with By Frame mode, if you wonder, does not change anything.

Here is a fresh project with a default character, non modified cloth and soft bake disabled. Shows both quirks.

I have become into the habit of completely removing any SoftCloth track data to avoid surprises. 

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Regarding your first Point, the soft cloth baking that occurs when you remove the animation is a behaviour introduced intentionally by RL when the remove scene animation feature was introduced in one of the patches, search for release notes of iclone between 6 and 6.5 it is mentioned in one of the patch notes. I personally hate this feature, creates alot of problems, i would like to see a checkbox to enable or disable this

Just like the character motion being frozen at the frame the timeline marker is on when you remove the animation, the softcloth is also frozen in its form at the position of the timeline marker when you remove all animation.

If you have time.... consider reading about physics... "Capture Transform."
This "Resets" your simulation to start.... from the exact "Point in time".... you want it to start at.

If iClone 7 doesn't have this "Basic Physics Tool".... FeedBack Tracker.
....without it.... Good Luck. 

I'm OK with first one, though do not see the point of freezing soft cloth (or at least it should have a checkbox in preferences as Raxel_67 suggested).

The point 1 actually came out while I was trying to troubleshoot point 2, which was my main concern - not a pretty scene... Or I am just being too picky.
I know, I know Swooop , we all want to see Max simulation tools in iClone. But this is not going to happen. You know that.. right?

RL implemented:
~ a small portion of nVidia PhysX tools. (No Flex nor SandBox)
~ "Partial Pinning" from MotionBuilder
~ No IK-FK Blending
~ Can't weight constraints between (2) objects
....about time they add more functionality.... for you. 

From your lips to God's RL ears...

You may have figured out a lot since then, I know that when you need to bake, you normally need to start at the beginning and yes if you stop at a frame and delete the animation, that becomes the default frame for the beginning of the animation -which could be a good thing.  

With all my experiments working with chain physics and the amount of work one has to do for speed and accuracy and the many parts one has to keep track of, I started the idea of a physics bake manager although that isn't the title but should be. If you like the idea to speed up, protect and prevent odd behavior in general consider voting for it here and comment if you have any ideas to add to this https://www.reallusion.com/FeedBackTracker/Issue/Adjustable-Physics-Calculation-Time-for-Sophisticated-Scenes/2  With this method, a project can be as complex as you like and wont have to fix positions/transforms etc

Often you may have a ton of props and you need to remove animations first or else it will blend a new bake previous into the other, a physics bake manager could automatically prevent this.

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