I read on a forum post somewhere that the Blender interface can be made to look like Max, Maya etc. I have tried, but it always ending up in a mess. I there a tutorial or a template that someone could send me to set this up so that I could give Blender another go ?

Thank you

well,
maybe this trick could help you.
or here I just found some ready to use files.

but I would recommend you to watch the tutorial videos on blender.org, which can be found here.
Firstly they will tell you how to set up the interface and secondly they will give you a quick start in blender. If you get the easy and fluent control, you'll feel familar with blender very soon. There are a lot of professionals, who tend to use blender, because you can achieve the same but in less time than with max/maya.

But don't worry when you cannot master Blender. The just Hotkey UI is not made for everybody.

or wait for the next big blender release (which is going to happen very soon).
they are going to rewrite the whole structure of the program and make it much easier to learn

As well as allow user configureable buttons and hot keys. I have a free blender UI tutorial video on my site BTW.

here you can download blender 2.50! :p

i am not sure about _very_ soon. i hope at some point in 2009.