to rjandron and stndesign, and anyone else who might be listening in.

The free version of UVmapper wasn't much use to me beyond the basic which LW is quite cabable of doing. I asked about UVmapper Pro because as rjandron said, "you want to avoid the distortions.
As my method has been (via a tutorial) to make a morph and un-weld and then un-wrap the image by hand I am still faced with moments of human vs mesh moments when I have to guess-timate what would be the proper way to flatten the geometry. In my case I am looking at a car body and its intimate details. Cars don't generally need a lot of texture like human skin but in my case where I'm distressing the car, it is very ugly to see on skin or car that the texture is stretching. 

$60 bucks is well within the envelope of reasonable if it helps unwrap a complex object so that painting is not impossible. Clearly, many people do it every year creating assets for film and games so there must be a good method. I am currently still prying vertices apart in a desperate attempt to make a map that I let alone anyone down the assembly line might be able to work with when creating new textures. 

I'll look into it, thanks, rjandron.

don