thanks guys. from what i've gotten so far, most of the scripts are in the vein of removing/cleaning up weird stuff in meshes as opposed to selecting components.

but maybe i can do something with booleans now that you mention it. boolean->intersection will result in a warning "cannot perform operation" if both arguments to the function are not intersecting. i might somehow manage to write some code to evaluate the result each time during a sequence of boolean operations between each pair of objects in the scene, storing the mesh's name in case the boolean succeeds.

however, the most i'd get out of that would be the knowledge of which meshes are intersecting. i'd still have to manually select each face from each mesh in order to scale it or move it.

plus that's a bunch of boolean/undo operations. sounds like a pretty inefficient hack and even dangerous if maya happens to crash while a boolean->intersection is in progress, haha.

anyway, some serious "intersecting geometry" googling is in order for me.

cheers

/lex