Okay, the first few times I tried to realign the texture map to the Z axis, I had no luck. I've been doing so much poking around, though, that I somehow accidentally got the map straightened out for the hair strands not in the ponytail. Now I've got to fix the others. I did notice that when I am in the vertex modeller, if I select the cross section, I get an option in the properties tray for mapping (spherical, cylidrical, box, custom - also asks for which axis). I've noticed that changing these options changes how the texture map works on the vertex object, so I'm still digging around there. As for reducing the surface fidelity of the spline model, I tried that and got a mess. I don't have to reduce it by much to get a significant reduction in the polygon count, but it looks ugly! I have one other idea I'm going to try. Will let you know if that works.