Only one I can really help you with is the second (may relate to the first, too) - blender lets you operate in "object mode" or "edit mode" (I think that's what it's called). In object mode, you can scale and translate objects. You can also scale and move vertexes at the in the edit mode. You want to do the latter. I'm not sure how you undo the object scale and translation, though.
Applying texture maps seems to be a long and tedious procedure in blender, and I don't remember how to do it offhand.