Thanks ctbram and bullet. I watched the uving section of the apache tutorial to get to grips with the uv tools.

But alas, I have hit my first technical glitch in Maya. When I'm in the "move UV shell tool" and want to do anything in the perspective view, I have to explicitly go out of the tool or else Maya may hang. My autosave is now every 5 minutes and activity monitor is on hand to kill Maya when it does decide to hang. (Tolerating the little feature that Maya terminates the current active tool when it does an autosave)

I'll try re-installing Maya.