To bo honest, I'm very very new to Maya unfortunately, so even some of the terminology used slows me down somewhat.

So basically, I'm struggling to get to grips with anything at the moment

The ball tutorial from memory, required going into the 'hypergraph'? window, selecting the 'grid' texture and I was supposed to drag and drop on to the ball in the model window though for some reason nothing appeared to happen.

I have both the PLE Maya and Maya Unlimited 6.0 and from what I have seen, there are not many differences apart from when tou turn shading on in the model window a maya watermark covers the model area.

Thanks for the link, I'll take a closer look after work!