I pre-selected the "selects" and rendered them as individual clips, which I refer to at the Explorer level. In XP you can see the pictures of each clip to refer to.
It's a bit of a kludge, but it works. I use two screens, with the Explorer open on one and VV on the other. I check the clip image on the Explorer window and then select it for inclusion on the Vegas side. Everything is sorted into folders at the Explorer level, so once the pre-selects are done, it makes working on large amounts of footage pretty easy. This is in VV3, as I haven't had the time to try any of the newer features in VV4, but was informed (here) that no improvement has really been made for sub-clip selection and organization.
Is there another (better) way????