I was experimenting with some textures from nasa at 2048x1024 and they don't seem to give me the seam problem. I toyed with using the 8096 ones but they're frigging huge and I'm sure maya would not be very happy trying to load a 400mb texture file. heh
I am thinking the problem might have been due to the resolution being odd. The original one I used was 2050 by something. Same aspect ratio though. I dunno. Anyway the new textures work great so I'm happy.