I was reading a post over at Blender Artist about selecting with the L key. Not only can you select non welded geometry but also geometry grouped by marking UV seams.

Also a tip on beveling: you can roll the mouse scroll wheel to add more edges to the bevel.  Welcome to Blender family :)

Thanks!  About the L key, I think it depends on how the model is created too.  Because as we discussed above briefly, it doesn't always work right if you have nothing selected under your cursor.  However, if I select a vertex or poly face, then it does what I wanted.  Strange, but I guess that's the way it goes sometimes. I found out about the scolling thing with Bevel, but thank you for mentioning it as well.  However, i really, really don't like the way bevel works in Blender.  The bevelling tool in Blender is an edge edit operation, not a face edit.  In 3dsmax, Bevel is a face-specific operation, and the equivalent feature to Blender's bevel is actually called "Chamfer" in 3dsmax.  So, the Max version of the Bevel operation is actually a combination of extrude and scale, performed on a particular face(s) selection.  Chamfering, on the other hand, is an action performed only on edges, as Bevel is in Blender.

In the 2015 release have a feature called "quad chamfer", which will create only quads at each vertex intersection, and then you have the option to push or pull the selected edges as a secondary operation, for making things like seams or piping in clothing or cushions.  I'm not sure how to do this yet in Blender, with the bevel tool.  See the example of what I mean here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC6Q0-B7XA8

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.