Art/All,
The reason maria.htr is so much smaller is that it is not the body_female.htr, but probably the demo.htr that is in the UltraHal characters folder. Body_female is about a meg, while demo.htr is only about 385k. Demo.htr doesn't have a skeleton to speak off (which is usually a {filename}.phy file, I think). Demo.htr also doesn't have the structure to carry all the abilities of the body_female.htr. For example, the hair is not a separate HTR file, but a small jpg. It also doesn't have a full texture file.
A good way to check this out is to start an HTR, then go to "C:Program FilesHaptekplayer". There is now a "hap_temp" folder that the HTR is expanded to. It has all the files that the HTR is made of (an HTR is like a zip file, but I think they use bzip2 instead). When you close the HTR, the folder goes away (unless you crash the htr, or place a text file in the folder). By looking in the folder, you can see exactly what is loaded.
Hope that helps.
virtually,
Joseph