I hope this subject is self-evident…if not please let me know.
My test gives some weird results

enclosed my test file

thanks!

UV Texture SOP was generating vertex attributes. Set the Apply To parameter to explicitly create point uv's and leave the projection method to Rows & Columns.

In the VOP network, get rid of the normalize. It just doesn't make sense to normalize UV co-ordinates as it is a position based attribute and not a vector direction based attribute. The UV Texture will create point uv's along the curve from 0 to 1 anyway.

That's all that was required.

thanks Jeff!!!