Hello, me again!

I watched a tutorial recently as I am still trying to figure out texturing. In it the person made a chair and showed how to build a texture map.

First they selected the whole model. They then opened up UV Editor, and in the top right hand corner was a jumble of meshes. They then clicked one of the polys on the screen (the chair leg for example), set it to cyclindrical mapping, and then it showed in the UV editor under the jumble. They then used the move tool to move the mesh in the editor to the left hand side and resize it. This was repeated for the whole mesh untill they had a map laif out, and this was moved back to the right hand square. This was then saved as a IFF (maybe) and imported to Photoshop where they drew over the template to make the map.

This seemed very easily and logical.

Now.... When I go into UV Editor on Maya 7.0 and select my mesh I sometimes see the move tool icon (the one with the yellow box and the red blue etc arrows) but when I try to move it the mesh stays in the same place, and only the tool moves. Sometimes no tool appears at all, and sometimes the meshes are all over the place and I cant even select them. UV Editor appears to be nothing more than a display tool.

Is there a step I am missing from this, or was it maybe an earlier version or a plugin that allowed this simplicity?

Does anyone have a better tutorial for 7.0 UV Texture map creation?