Martin, i think the plug in your talking about is dashboard id by Uniform's Sam O'Hare... you can pick it up at
www.pixelpollen.co.uk (or whatever his web site address is - find one of his posts its listed in his footer i think).
The problem for me is that i want to assign the same id to all the faces of an element, but i want different elements of an object to have randomly asssigned values.
Meher, thanks for the link - looks interesting but i'm not 100% sure its gonna do what i envisage.
I've ended up just biting the bullet and assign each UVW map individually as a instance, it didn't actually take too long but i still hope they don't change anything on these elements!!
Its time like these that knowing Maxscript would be invaluable.