Oh, terribly sorry if I haven't been explaining very well!
Earlier, I had suggested to cylindrical wrap the the column to get your uv mapping. The works, but the tops and bottoms may not match on the map. By default, Second Life wants a spherical wrap, not a cylindrical wrap. But... SL does let you change that with script. If you make a new script in your prim, and paste the code I posted inside it, it will change the uv mapping mode inside SL. Presuming you cylindrical mapped the column in AC3D, changing the mode to cylindrical in SL would make both match, so you should get a better output result.
As for suggestions to adjust the map, how much map space you give to an element determines how many polygons it gets in SL. If you have details that aren't showing up, trying giving them more space on the texture map. Here is another post with pictures that better explains what I mean:
http://www.inivis.com/forum/showpost...45&postcount=5