One last thing...

Your shader tip worked a charm

However, after spending about 4 hours tweaking uv's, I thought of something. (doh!!)

Um, should I be selecting faces, and running your scripts on my object AFTER smoothing it?
..or before smoothing?

I ask because after doing a uv snapshot of my unsmoothed object uv's, I plopped a test texture in it & saved it out as a tif, then I applied that back to the color slot of my shader, and did a test render, and...

It was garbled a bit?

Just wondering