Hairs not too bad once you get your head round it, Shaves a great plug in and worth it if your doing a lot of hair work.

What method are you using to create the hair?

For long hair I generally create a nurbs surface based off a few lofted curves that creates the look of the hair, alomst modeling if you will. I then create curves off the surface, quite a number of curves that will become the hair.

I then assign a hair system via a sphere (so the hair already exists in the scene) to the curves. The method is based off an old tutorial that was availalbe on the net (might still be available)

The above allows control over the look of the haid as you can simply adjust the NURBS surface to control the hair.