I wish i could tell ya buddy, i've been using maya for about ten months now, the benefits of nurbs attracted me to the method immediately, however i've give up on it somewhat now, i too had the same kind of probs with attaching stuff, i got sick of the message 'cannot attach a trimmed surface' for one, and even when succesfully attaching untrimmed stuff, i seemed to hit probs when it came to animating them.
So subsequently recently i turned attentions to poly modeling which gave me great results in no time, Dirk Bialluchs 'Connect Poly Shape' is a great little tool which gives you a smoothed proxy feedback whilst you control minimal vertice points on a 'base' mesh, (it mirrors your low poly model and creates another subdivided version of it).
It seems that if your a bit of a beginner like myself then nurb modelling is best left for the future, nurbs and subdivision might come a little easier to me after first mastering the poly, sorry i can't help you much, you need a Maya guru in here, theres plenty of 'em around but they're pretty busy if not employed in the field, if you don't get a reply just bump the thread up again in a couple of days or so 
That arms looking pretty good so far though
Last edited by Aphex; 18-06-2003 at 12:47 PM.