As far as I know, once you hide a node in maya all children are also hidden. You can get around this problem with most objects by hiding the shape node instead, which leaves all the objects children alone because they are parented to the transform node.

Of course what you want to do can't be done this way because joints do not have shape nodes.

What you can do is parentConstraint objects to joints so that they are on a different hiarachy. This will allow you to hide the skeleton but leave visible any objects that are parented to it.

Also don't forget the Show menu so you can hide all joints in the scene.

Hope this helps,

Richard