Hi Val, in the future at some point I may be able to try some alternative selection methods, but it's a pretty complicated area to deal with. Just popping up a huge list of things is not really a very friendly mechanism either.

For now really you are best off with hiding objects that are getting in your way of selecting things. If you do want to hide most of the object but leave some structure of the object in place, then you can do that by selecting all of the object's faces (select 1 face first and then do a Ctrl+A) and then hide them, that will leave the edges of the object to still be displayed but let you pick through it.

Using that method you can set up individual objects into a wireframe type mode.

- Michael