Rigging the model

I have had a few problems as I expected rigging the model. I found a tutorial to help as I felt that it was important to have a good rig for moving the character around and to try and make the animation process as simple as possible. I wanted to have inverse kinematics for the arms as I thought it would be easier to position them by dragging the wrist instead of rotating the shoulder and elbow joints. The arms are a little dysfunctional in some of the positions, but I feel at this stage they are a good as I can do with the time constraints, I feel that I need to start animating in order to meet the deadline. I have had a few problems as well with deformation of my character when moving certain parts, when I finished rigging and bound the skin to the skeleton I have quite a bad deformation under the arm which meant that the side of the body came out as the arm went up in the air, I have sorted most of the issues out using the paint weight tool which adjusts which skeleton joint has influence over the different areas of the skin. I'm still struggling to get the paint weight tool to function properly and I'm wondering whether I have a bug in my Maya programme, it certainly doesn't appear to be doing what the tutorial says!
Anyway I think I've fixed the problems to a sufficient degree to animate. I can't be a perfectionist unfortunately as don't have the time, I need to leave it and move on.