Hi. Some people use UV Layout software for unwrapping. Heard it is pretty good. Others use the free UV Roadkill. In my case, I find Blender a great and fast program for UV unwrapping. select edge>Ctrl-E> mark\unmark seams>U-Unwrap and you’re done. For Maya users, I have made a controll scheme that emulates Maya behaviour and also some sort of guide. You can unwrap in Blender, then export back to Maya. Here are the scheme and guide: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?324685-Blender-complete-guide-for-Maya-users-(with-adapted-controll-scheme-file) Hope you’ll find them useful.
And about your problem…seems that your texture it stretched. You need somehow to make Maya display the texture stretching then remap the stretched parts. UV Layout displays stretching in a color code. In Blender, you press N, to enable proprietes pannel, and under display enable stretch. To get good results, you should keep your UV map colour blue. More info here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Textures/Mapping/UV