basically man to get that long rectangle i did it the long way, i selected all the uv's then split them, then grabbed the uv's of the polygon face i wished to start on, moved them to a free space in the editor, then selected an edge and used the move and sew tool. i repeated that till i had one strip of polygon faces, then repeated the process for the next strip of faces, etc etc. to get them lined up straight i just selected a row of uv's and used the scale tool to straighten them. it did take a while but it was more tedious than hard if you know what i mean.