i would unwrap this a bit differently (is this the final wanted uv-map in your example?). a planar mapping isn't that great for cylindrical objects but of course in med this isn't really possible in a better way.

so would you be interested in a video of how i would do it in blender?

In my case, planar mapping is what I seem to prefer. Although I do have spheres and things like that where other types of mappings are better, almost all of my cases seem to use planar mapping, or whatever MED uses.

As to the video, that depends. It seems as if I don't have a lot of codecs and often can't view videos because of it, uncompressed (but zipped up (the bzip2 algorithm in Winzip works very well with videos - my videos from my animations compress better than 2000:1 in some cases)) is my best method at the moment. If otherwise, a series of many screenshots would be useful.

i would do a short flash animation like the tutorials in my signature.

Please don't use flash - I don't want to have to install the flash plug-in in Firefox or use any other browser. Flash often has sounds and those types of ads are ultra annoying and I'd rather go without it.

i have disabled flash in firefox for the same reasons but just for watching the video you could use ie. i don't have and want to use any other software to capture videos.

Well, like you have in this thread, screenshots are useful. I don't know what I'm doing wrong to cause UV maps to not get created. I have, however, found out how to get the UV map window visible, but it replaces either the 3D view or the the second view. Although there is a third view (the very bottom area where all those buttons are), it doesn't seem worth "replacing". How do you manage to get the vertical splitter? From the start, I'm only able to get one more additional view added. One of your screenshots has 5 items - I only get up to 3....

ok, then just some hints:

• to split a window right click at a border of the window. if you click on a vertical border you can split windows horizontally, if you click on a horizontal border you can split windows vertically. like you see in the appearing pop up menu you can also join them again of course.
  
  
• with the leftmost button on a window header you can set the type of the window.
  
  
• you got the uv window visible? good! it's very helpful! best try to make a window layout like in my above screenshot. one uv window and one 3d view in face select mode.
  
  
• in the uv window load your textures (image -> open). the texture will get assigned to the currently selected faces.
  
  
• in the 3d view window header you can set the draw mode to textured.
  
  
• then you can either do projections like in med, or use the more advanced unwrap function (i will explain the unwrap function later).
  
  
• to do projections, select the wanted faces, press "u" and select the projection method. also make sure you are in the right view (top, side,...) since many projections types depend on it. experiment with that a bit...
  
  
• in the uv window you can select your uvs and move [g], scale [s] or rotate [r] them. to select all linked uvs of a selected uv press [l]. during move, scale or rotate mode you can also input numbers. use [tab] to jump to the next input field. also try out [view -> properties].
  
  

i hope this helps so far? if not just keep asking...

I've got the texture now imported and from all those tests trying to create a UV map, I have a *huge* mess in the UV map window. I have polygons going in every which direction imaginable criss-crossing in several weird ways making it utterly impossible to tell what face is what without selecting them individually. How do you completely erase the UV maps so I can start over? This mess was funny-looking so I snagged a screenshot of it:

Screenshot #5 (~316 KB) - The huge mess with the UV map window. Lines from faces are going in every direction possible all tangled up and criss-crossing each other in such a jumbled up mess.

hm... looks like you did something wrong. i don't know what you did but maybe you should try to do one thing after another and not all faces at once.

...
to start over either select all faces ([a]), press "u" and select "reset 1/1".

or set the lower window to be a button window, press [f9] to show the edit buttons and then in the mesh panel press the texface [delete] button. i think this also deletes the texture assignments though.

I used the "reset 1/1" thing as you said and things did get "cleaned up", however, the UV map is still present. Using the texface delete button apparently did help, but the UV map is still there. As long as it doesn't delete the actual BMP file I was using (I've got like 5 or 6 backups of it anyway).