I'm sorry but the issue isn't about the merits of Maya 2008 or whether I should upgrade or not, just to achieve a quicker or a more precise preview!

I appreciate your quick response and I know I tend to provide too much information when I write and perhaps my questions get lost in the meaning but, I'm just trying to provide some context so you can appreciate the effort I'm making here.

If I'm not clear about my needs I apologize for that and will make more of an effort to be more concise.

My original question, and the point of this discussion, which was apparently lost among my words is:

As I create the pieces that make up my project, do I smooth them, SAVE the work and continue to work on other portions of the project and is there some reason not to do this? This is but one aspect of what isn't covered in the manual; and that is the working discipline one takes with each project.

The reason I ask is this; I don't want to use the Smooth command and save my work only to find out the work is irretrievably broken.

So as I sit here, all of the pieces that make up my project are pretty much in their most basic state; un-smooth. I was also wondering, does this un-smooth state also contribute to un-smooth projections in the UV Editor?

I'm not, at this point anyway, concerned about my computer's performance. It's wicked fast and Maya has a core2duo and 4GB of ram to work with... so it isn't a performance penalty that concerns me when working with something like that which is displayed in picture C. It's the thought of having to go in and do even more work with all that geometry!

My hand is being punished enough as it is just having to push and pull on points on the un-smooth stuff.