one very important thing about cloth simulation is:
it never ends simulating unless you say STOP.

that said - a bit more details. cloth simulation is a process, that lets you get a head start. so the cloth looks as if it was lieing there already when you animation starts. a slight "bug" is, that it is a bit hard to recreate the same cloth state as cloth is never still in maya - even if it lies on the table for hours. i suggest you dont use the simulation to dress up your characters. instead let the animation play. make sure your cloth collision object is static for this process and that you check "play every frame" and dont let it play endless (very important). you set the animation to about 200 frames. play it, and you see how the cloth wraps. if you are satisfied how it started to evolve, DO NOT go back to the timeline. select the cloth, and choose "set initial cloth state". now you can go back to first frame. and if the cloth is not ready yet, play the animation again. it starts now with the half dressed cloth. and if something goes wrong, say it ran too long. just dont set the initial cloth state, go back to first frame thus deleting the "simulation" you just did in this step. make the animation shorter and retry.

that is, as far as i know, the ONLY way to have full control over the cloth simulation. and the nice thing about that is - if you forget to set the initial cloth state, all you have to do to have the exact same result, is to run the animation for that amount of frames which you did in your first attempt to do so. possibly doing it in smaller steps as cloth is relatively slow, but really cool if correctly tweaked

hope that helps