MAXSCALE prob solved, new ? re: scale in general

[David L. Kriske]

Sorry for the earlier post.  I was able to figure my MAXSCALE problem.
Seems that the UNITS line in the map object refers to the scale units, not
EXTENT units.  I changed that to meters and resolevd the problem.  Now,
however, it seems that my scale measurements are off by many factors.
Would someone be able to explain to me how EXTENT, SCALE, UNITS, etc all
interoperate when displaying an ARCVIEW generated shapefile in an
unprojected space (ie, geographic coordinates, not any projection)?  I
have the following entered in my map file.

EXTENT -126 45 -65 30

This displays a shapefile that covers the entire
US.  I used these coordinates when I assumed the extent could be written
in terms of lat/long degrees.

The problem is that the legend bar, set for meter units, shows that the
entire US is approximately 60 meters long, when it should be more like
6000 km long or 6,000,000 meters.  The scaling is off by a factor of
100,000.  This carries over to the MAXSCALE measurement, in which a layer
wont show up on this zoomed-out view if it's set to MAXSCALE 300, but
will show up at MAXSCALE 3000.

If someone could shed some light onto how EXTENT and SCALE is calculated
given an arcview-created shapefile in unprojected units, I'd be most
grateful!!

David