[lisa]

Ah, gotcha.

Have you tried a cylindrical or spherical map? Does it look any better?

The other possibility is to planar map, and then stitch the vertices together in the TCE. (Line up the sections and then snap the vertices together along the seam.) This will remove the problem of seams at the expense of some distortion of the map. This works very well for organic or highly textured surfaces, but it is poor for things like text and line art as there is usually some stretching.