I recently realized that the direction you create your selection box changes how objects are selected. One way selects only fully enclosed objects in the box and the other way selects objects that intersect the box. This has helped me immensely with selecting buried objects. Also, I believe you can hold down a key to ignore certain types of objects while selecting, but I'm not familiar with this feature and might have misunderstood something I read in these forums. I don't mean to interrupt a question to Michael directly, but I hope this helps you.