hey guys, im new here... im trying to teach myself some maya by reading some books and stuff, so far its going really great, till i figured out I am having this little problem. I couldn't find anything leading to an answer anywhere after hours of searching, so I thought i'd see if some experienced users could be kind and give me a hand maybe. I searched on google for some forums, and this is the first active forum that came up.

So I am having trouble with the attribute editor window, it wont display all of the attributes for something I select. It will only show the first 5 or so attributes and the rest are cut off. If I scroll down I can see all the different catagories of attributes, but the individual attributes in a catogory aren't always there. For example, a tutorial I was trying to follow had me applying materials to objects for my first time, when I tried to put a 2 dimensional grid texture onto an object, it told me to alter a few of its color options, but I could not see those particular options, or find them anywhere - even though they appeared on the screen capture in the example and in the instructions. I followed the instructions very closely, and even tried starting over a few times to see if I did something wrong, but I got the same thing every time.

For all of the basic beginer work I have done so far, I have been editing attributes in the channel box, or I didn't even realize there were more attributes available that were getting cut off. Does anyone know why this might be happening? or what I could try to do about it? I am out of ideas. Thanks for reading my plea, I appreciate it.