Parenting and deformation I've been working on a human for 2 days, but every time I parent the skeleton to the model, the legs bend the wrong way. I rotate the pole as I saw in an instructional vid, getting the skeleton to move correctly. However, when I then paint weights, the model deforms extremely -- as in, when I make it even slightly green, it deforms while I'm painting.

I then tried fixing the leg's pole angles before parenting, but even then, the weight painting always causes extreme deformities. It only seems to paint correctly when the pole angle is 0, but in most cases, having it at 0 doesn't allow for the leg to move correctly.

I saw an instructional video on this, and the artist was easily able to change the pole angle without affecting the weight painting.
This sounds like you may have you have already 'Posed' your armature. 

When an armature is already posed, parenting somthing to it will cause the child to take on the armatures pose. You need to only use 'edit mode' for choosing how the armature is set up. However this can be fixed:

Select the armature, go to pose mode, then Ax2 (or 1) just to select all bones. Then hit Alt+R, Alt+G, Alt+S, to clear all data on the bones. 

When this is done your armature won't be where you wanted it, so go to edit mode to fix it back to the way you wanted.