Frances and James, you're geniuses.

I had a brief look at 2.61 cycles and I am totally frustrated. I understood the materials and textures interface reasonably well (not in all details, but anyway), but now I'm totally lost.

A simple example - I have a sphere and wat to apply a seamless tile - twice in the vertical direction and 4x in the horizontal direction, and I want the mapping to be spherical.
Fairly simple in the previous version of Blender but I wouldn't know where to start with cycles...

I will put a question on the Blender forum to see if there is any help (documentation, tutorials, ...) for newbies like me that want to start with cycles. I have the Blender for Dummies, but that's 2.5 based so I can stil use it for modeling and probably animating, but when it comes to materials it is outdated.

A frustrated Blender user... I might have to change my signature for the time being