Yes, unfortunately all of the UV tools available for SU tend to do this, because when push comes to shove SU doesn't really have any real UV system.
Gai's suggestion is good if you want to stick with SU...but it may reult in some fairly large maps.
Alternateively, you could wait until it's in Max to map it...or if that's too tricky try something like Ultimate Unwrap 3D, which is much easier to use, pretty cheap and has the added bonus of being able to export the resulting mesh in a dizzying number of formats.

The Quad Face Tools plugin you suggested seems to work great so far, my thanks to you for drawing my attention to it (and thomthom for creating it). The texture distortion is acceptable, I'm just happy that I won't have to spend hours repeating the same tedious task for hundreds of faces. Thanks again.

TIG
Thanks a lot for your help.

Marc