I am trying to UV unwrap an object and must admit I am relatively new to the process. When I perform an unwrap, the proceduce takes the face of one of my objects, isolated by seams on all sides, and stretches it to very odd proportions. I can somewhat fix it in the UV/Image editor by stretcing and shrinking things down but that is a horrible pain. Is there any way to tell it to take a face from the unwrap procedure and simply do not modify the proportions of that face from the original model? If it at least stretched them all the same way, I could just shrink it in the Y dir for example. But some are rotated. Some are more stretched than others, etc. 
As a picture is worth a 1000 words, here’s one that shows the problem. Why is my perfect circle on the model coming out like an egg on the UV screen?
You always have to tweak your UV unwrap. Just part of the process. In the UV window, you can grab, scale, etc. the verts to make it nicer/better layout.
You may want to try the Archimap projection for that type of object/mesh though. May provide better initial results. In the UV options panel, you can choose that vs. the standard LSCM unwrapping.
BgDM
I was worried you were going to say that. The model itself may not be completely done. I noticed a save UV map function in the scripts included in blender. Does that work well to allow someone to continue modifying the model and keeping the UV texturing work? What happens when the modeling creates new faces? I presume those won’t be accounted for in the saved UV map.
Also, it seems reasonable to fix a square that got skewed. But a circle with all those verts? How could one ever make it look like a circle again? It seems an impossible task
Unwrap in sections. Select the faces of the side and unwrap from view (align view to selection first with shift-v).
Excellent advice. Thanks for taking the time to respond!
the wiki explains the UV process and the use of multiple UV maps, and each script as well…some work better than others. As soylent indicated, Blender was trying to fit all your faces in one square image, so it had to smush the circle into an oval.