I finally managed to make a torus. (Yes, I realise you could just click 
"add torus". But I wanted to see if it's possible to model it by hand.) 
It's not an especially rounded torus, and it's taken about 20 minutes to 
do, but it's vaguely torus-shaped. (See attached.)

My method was to start with a cube [since every tutorial I've found 
always starts with a cube], scale it, and punch a hole through it.

Sounds easy, right? Well let me tell you: it isn't.

First, I want to scale it on just two axies, not all three. Apparently 
you can do this by pressing the letter of the axies you want to scale 
along. (Still not sure why the Y axis is drastically less sensitive than 
the X axis. I specifically put the mouse pointer in exactly the just 
spot before hitting the scale button...)

Next, punch a hole in the middle. Now the ideal thing to do here would 
be to just draw a circular hole in the top and delete the face inside 
it. But I have no clue how to do that. After much searching [earlier 
today], I discovered that you can do an "edge subdivide", which takes an 
edge and puts a new vertex in the middle of it. If you select the top 
face of the cube and hit subdivide, the face turns into four smaller 
faces. So far so good.

However, this operation also "shatters" all the other faces that touch 
the top. And after a considerable length of time, I was utterly unable 
to find a way to remove the extra unwanted edges without also removing 
the faces they form part of. (WTF?)

After a while, I discovered that if you select the top and bottom 
surfaces of the cube simultaneously (yes, apparently you can do that), 
and subdivide both faces at once, you get a reasonable grid of points 
that you can then work with.

Subdivide again and now the top and bottom each consist of 4x4 squares. 
Now delete the middle four faces from the top and button surfaces.

This kind-of works. You now have a gaping hole in the middle though. 
After a refreshingly brief search, I was able to determine that [space] 
-> edit -> faces -> make face/edge will add a new face, so long as you 
have two edges selected. At least, it seems to work in this instance.

Turn on the subsurf thingy and the result is a slightly torus-shaped 
thingamy.

Now, if I can determine how to move all the existing geometry around 
without completely destroying it, I might be able to rearrange all the 
points into a more circular configuration. (Although obviously it'll 
never be symmetrical...)

FWIW, it also took a Google search to figure out how to *save* the 
rendered image. o_O Pretty obvious once you already know the answer 
though...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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