You sir, you're a scholar and a gentleman. Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction! I agree with you that, by now, there should be an easier way of customizing and setting up your own context sensitive marking menus. I could just imagine how sweet it would be if you had that functionality for every single type of element - right click on a NURBS surface and access the most useful NURBS editing tool, right click a light and get the lights equivalent of that etc. I the meantime however, I have to settle for this more manual approach, and the different contextPoly files were just what I was looking for.

As far as safety goes, I've made backups of all files that I'm going to edit, and in addition to that I make no changes to the actual core files, instead I make copies of them which I edit and then place in the maya scripts folder. So hopefully I'll won't come crying to you, but you'll never know

Since I've already have you here and you seem to know what you're talking about, I have two bonus questions which you might be able to answer for me:

1. What's the point of the .res files? It seems to be only for naming purposes and, since I don't want to rename any tool or command I don't need to make any changes to them, do I?

2. If I would like to create my own context sensitive menu, like the ones I talk about at the top of this post, do you think that it would be difficult? Any tips on how to go about doing that? The way I see it you could create for example a NURBS editing menu, using the already existing polygon menus as a template, and then in the dagMenuProc.mel tell Maya to display said menu if what you're clicking at is a NURBS surface, or even more detailed - displaying different menus depending on if you've selected a vertex point, isoparm or hull etc. What do you think, maybe I'm a bit to naive and it's really not that simple?

Anyway, thanks again for your help - much appreciated!

// Johan Wendesten