Issues when importing to Blender

[dialNforNinja]

I've been having some real trouble getting things to import properly, whether working with OBJ or LWO files - texture maps are usually stripped, and sometimes the parts are apparently scattered at random and need to be manually selected and returned to position 0,0,0 and 0 rotation. I had examples lined up, but have forgotten them while waiting for my account to be activated - I forgot why I was leaving those tabs open and closed them all. D'oh. I know the texture problem at least was in evidence on Mark Kingsworth's amazing Insignia class modular ship. That one has so many polygons my poor laptop chokes for a few seconds any time I try to select something or move the camera so I'm halfway throuh my own modular ship (or three, if you count kitbashing multiple hull layouts via rearranging the parts) anyway, but it would be nice if I could import Galaxy or Intrepid room and corridor parts from here or from the Sketchup archives to re-dress for my purposes, not to mention shuttles and other ships to use in exterior scenes.

I'll make a couple quick shots of my model and post them to see if there's any interest there as well, I guess. It's kind of TOS-slick at this point and the (S)Excelsior -like engineering hull is kind of meh due to focusing on the Miranda (or more accurately Centaur) like saucer-only configuration, but that smoothness does make it look great rendered in chrome with gold accents

Anyway, I know Blender's import/export support has historically been kind of spotty, but I thought that was supposed to be fixed in more recent (where "post 2.6" is recent) versions. Is this just normal? What's more I know there was somewhere I poked at a couple years ago to look at what texture the model wanted and then find it in the model's folder to bring them back, but for the life of me cannot figure out how I did that now. I'm working with Blender 2.79b at the moment, mostly because that's what's in the Ubuntu Software Centre and it works perfectly well for what I want it to do otherwise, but I remember having both problems in 2.59 as well. Does anybody know how to solve this? I know there's at least a few Blender users around, since some of the models have blend files available directly.